


Dead Man's Party

by EndoplasmicPanda



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Cabeswater Returns, Canon Compliant, Drug Abuse, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Joseph Kavinsky Lives, Joseph Kavinsky is His Own Warning, M/M, POV Alternating, Post-Canon, Rebirth, Soft Joseph Kavinsky, Suicide Attempt, aka my brand
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2020-07-09 15:25:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 26,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19890067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EndoplasmicPanda/pseuds/EndoplasmicPanda
Summary: When Joseph Kavinsky closes his eyes to a fireball on the night of the Fourth of July and opens them to the messy frat house of Henry Cheng eleven months later, the message isn’t exactly subtle:you’re not finished yet.(Or: When Joseph Kavinsky could no longer make trouble, the trouble made him.)





	1. Chill Out, Dickwad

When Joseph Kavinsky found himself startlingly and unpleasantly reborn, it wasn't immediately obvious.

He was naked, sprawled across the dislodged front hood of a white Mitsubishi, grass poking at his bare toes through the cracks in the cement beneath his feet. The drag strip looked long abandoned, fences covered in overgrown vines, trees dipping too far into the makeshift grandstands that framed the tracks, and the lights - the massive, towering structures over which Kavinsky once reigned - were black, dark as the rest of the night sky.

He groaned, pulling himself up, wincing when he realized his skin was raw and singed. His clothes paid the price, it seemed, and his body was still cashing the check.

Walking proved difficult - his lungs felt charred and his hair felt crispy and his joints were stiff and rigid. He did his best to not walk like a zombie through the front gate, but considering the circumstances, he’d be lucky to not be shot by a rogue, trigger-happy Henriettan.

The cold settled in after the pain did, and after the cold came reality: he was alive. He could have sworn he wasn't. The last thing he remembered was picking a fight with Ronan Lynch, doing a line off the hood of his car, and falling victim to his own hubris - all part of the plan. Joseph Kavinsky wasn’t one to half-ass anything, least of all his own suicide. Things had gone exactly how he’d expected.

So why was he still alive?

He stepped on a particularly rough pebble and hissed, hugging himself around the chest, feeling particularly sober. If this was hell, he was ready to believe it. Only Kavinsky’s God would make hell look like Henrietta, cool in the haze of early summer. 

He rounded a corner and found himself on another road, lined with trees and old buildings and stately-looking victorian mansions. They were all dormant, quiet and dark and untouchable, except for one - one at the corner, lit in a quiet, warm, yellow. Despite himself, Kavinsky found himself limping toward it.

There was a strange-shaped electric car parked out front, and the front lawn was overgrown and unkempt in a lived-in, forgotten sort of way. He didn’t exactly have time for modesty - he was still dead, as far as he was concerned - so he simply walked up the front steps of the wrap-around porch, pulled back the screen covering the front door, and banged out an unsteady rhythm.

He heard footsteps and grumbling and then the door was open and he was looking at Henry Cheng.

He was wearing loose-fitting pajamas - a weathered Pink Floyd t-shirt and a pair of purple-pink Hello Kitty sweatpants. Over his ears were a set of massive headphones. In one hand he had a Nintendo DS; the other held a rapidly-draining Capri-Sun to his lips.

He dropped the Capri-Sun.

“What,” Henry said, licking his lips, skin paling, “the _fuck_.”

* * *

“Is this the part where you tell me you’re the Terminator?” Henry asked, burrowing through a chest of drawers in his bedroom, back to Kavinsky, who was perched awkwardly on the edge of Henry’s bed. “Sorry, but I don’t have a spare motorcycle lying around.”

“What am I, thirty?”

Henry gave him an assessing look from over his shoulder, being very, _very_ careful not to look too far down. Kavinsky smirked and spread his legs apart a little further.

“You don’t” --Henry coughed, turning back to his dresser-- “have to be thirty to appreciate the classics, man.”

Kavinsky rolled his eyes. “Whatever. Do you have something I can wear or not?”

“I’m sorry, you’ll forgive me for not stripping off my underoos and tossing them your way,” Henry shot back. “I’m looking. Give me a second.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Cheng,” Kavinsky said. “I’ll fit in whatever you’ve got lying around.”

“That’s not--” Henry ran a hand through his (surprisingly unkempt) hair, prying his misplaced headphones off from around his ears and throwing them down on the bed next to Kavinsky. The soft wailing of Madonna was unmistakable. “You just _had_ to show up the night before laundry day, didn’t you?”

Kavinsky frowned. He scratched a phantom itch on his arm - it was still red and sore from the flame. “Honestly, who the fuck even knows,” he said.

Henry looked at him again, correctly sensing the shifting of Kavinsky’s attention. “About what?”

“About all of this,” he said, leaning back. Henry’s bed was surprisingly comfortable. Maybe he could dream himself out of this situation - back to the bleak land of nonexistence. “I don’t even know what fucking day it is.”

“Like I said. The day before laundry day. Talk about inconsiderate.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand anyway.” Kavinsky stood, marching across Henry’s bedroom to stand next to him. He wrenched open a drawer, pulled out a pair of plain black Aglionby sweats, and started sliding them over his feet. “What?” he asked when Henry gave him a mortified glare. “You were taking too long.”

“You’re worse than Lynch, I swear,” Henry grumbled, and Kavinsky froze.

“What,” he said, letting the waistband of the sweats slap against the bare skin of his hips, “do you know about Lynch?”

Henry rolled his eyes. “Oh. Right. I forgot you and him had a whole ‘thing’ going on.” He made mocking air quotes at the word _thing_. 

“You don’t know shit,” Kavinsky said. “What the fuck is going on?”

Henry looked at him like he’d grown a second head. “Dude. You damn near broke down my door at three in the morning, completely naked, looking like you’d just fallen from the sky. And that’s not to mention the fact you’ve been dead for eleven months. You’re right. I _don’t_ know shit.”

Kavinsky froze. “Eleven months?” he breathed.

“Yeah, man. You bit the dust last summer.” Henry closed the drawers, seeing as they were no longer necessary. “It’s, like, halfway through June right now.”

Kavinsky opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “Oh,” he said, dumbly. For once, he didn’t have something asinine to add.

Henry waggled a finger at him, as though invisibly weaving together a plan in the air between them. “You know what?” he said, in a snapped, tight way. “I’m calling Gansey.”

Kavinsky snorted. “What, that idiot? What’s he going to do, run me over with that orange death trap of his?”

(Kavinsky, in fact, had a fierce fascination - and borderline appreciation - for Richard Gansey’s 1973 Camaro. It was not, however, something he was willing to admit out loud.)

(It might have had something to do with its second-hand association to Ronan Lynch, but that was neither here nor there.)

Henry already had his phone out. He crossed his arms waiting for the dial tone to ring through, hunched so far over himself he looked like a scoliosis patient.

Kavinsky just leaned back and let Henry’s bed swallow him whole. It wasn’t a bad feeling - soft, warm, _dry_ \- but Kavinsky was still more enraptured by the fact he was feeling _anything_ , at all, full stop.

With rebirth came the sharp, stinging, logical sense of sobriety. He grimaced. All of the little things came rushing back - college and bills and money and legacy and family and notoriety and drugs and parties and love and sexuality and ten thousand other smaller, more emotional things that humans didn’t quite have words for, but Kavinsky felt regardless. 

“Gansey?” Henry said. He opened his mouth, frozen with half of a word hanging out of his mouth, eyebrows knotted together beneath his glasses, teeth flashing white beneath where his gums pulled back in a grimace. “Yes. Yes. I’m fine. I know-- yes. Yes, I have a passport sorted out, Gansey, I’m a foreign student for fuck’s sake--”

Kavinsky laughed. Some things never changed, and Richard Gansey’s overbearing neuroses was certainly evergreen. “Wow, Dick’s really on a roll tonight.”

Henry shot him a pouty glare - something embarrassingly endearing. Kavinsky curled a lip. “Don’t be rude, Skynet.”

The conversation must have traveled through the microphone, because Henry’s face knotted up again. “Gansey, please, can you let me talk for more than five seconds? I don’t know if you realize it or not, but it’s four in the morning, and I’m not the type to make booty calls.”

“Hey, Dick!” Kavinsky shouted, voice carrying across the room and echoing down the stairs. He cackled. “How’s it hanging?” 

“Is Ronan there?” Henry said into the phone. He winced. “Yeah. Please do. I need all the help I can get.”

* * *

Ronan Lynch was many things. Patient was not one of them.

“Come on, Gansey,” he muttered, arms crossed over his leather jacket, even though it was still muggy as hell outside. Ronan Lynch dealt with the weather the same way he dealt with things that made him impatient: barrel through and dare said things to do something about it. “Put those loafers to use.”

“I can’t go any faster than this,” Gansey said. He was wearing a thin jacket over his bare chest - something he’d thrown on at the last minute. Apart from the shoes, his rich boy ensemble was thoroughly trounced. “You heard what Adam said as well as I did the last time I had her in at the shop. If I go any faster I’ll flood the carbs.”

“If you go any faster you’ll flood the carbs,” Ronan whined, mimicking Adam’s soft Henriettan accent. “Come _on._ Be your own man. Embrace failure.”

“Fine,” Gansey said, and the Camaro roared underneath them. “But you’re the one pushing both of us when she inevitably breaks down.”

“Please do not emote on behalf of your car,” Ronan said. He stared out the window and watched the trees blow by, hazy in the midsummer humidity. Normally, Ronan was more than content to let Gansey live his strange fantasies as he saw fit. But this night wasn’t normal. It wasn’t every day that strange classmates came back from the dead.

Ronan glanced at Gansey out of the corner of his eye, watching him hum the tune to a History Channel show as he drove, bobbing his head back and forth. Well. Maybe not every _other_ day.

“Honestly, I’m very excited,” Gansey said, as if Ronan had asked him what he was thinking. “Joseph was just as much a mystery as you were, back when all of… that happened last summer.”

The ‘that’ to which Gansey was referring just so happened to be Kavinsky’s attempted murder-suicide death pact on the prior year’s Fourth of July, but neither of them needed that specific detail filled in. The somber look on Matthew’s face the moment they pulled him out of one of Kavinsky’s duplicate shitbox Japanese Hot Wheels was detail enough. 

He didn’t particularly want to think about it.

“If it makes a difference what I think” --and Ronan knew it didn’t-- “I say let’s throw him in Dean’s trunk and let him think real hard about whether he wants to come back to life or not.”

“Please don’t call Mr. Grey that,” Gansey said. “You know how much it upsets Blue’s mom.”

“She can deal with it.”

Gansey continued, ignoring him. “Besides, I wouldn’t think Joseph would have had much of a say in the matter. You know how ley lines tend to be. It’s a miracle he came back at all.” There was a twinkle in the side-eye he shot Ronan from around his glasses. “Maybe we can use it to our advantage.”

Ronan’s mouth twitched into a grin. “See, why didn’t you say that in the first place? Let’s hook the fucker up to a machine and make him a lab rat.”

“Maybe in less… medieval terms, yes,” Gansey said. “There’s always room for some gentle experimentation.” 

Gansey hadn’t said it, but Ronan heard the ulterior motive spoken between them nonetheless: _maybe we can bring back Cabeswater._

The Pig turned off the main road toward the sea of Victorian mansions on the old side of town. It was a well-traveled route, now that Henry had been folded into their motley crew as easily as Noah had been folded out of it. _That_ was something Ronan didn’t want to think about, either.

Litchfield House loomed in front of them like an image from a college Greek life brochure, complete with unmowed front lawn and crookedly-parked exotic vehicles shoved haphazardly into the carport at the side. Gansey added to their collection by parking the Pig behind Henry’s Fisker, throwing the car into neutral, and letting it grumble itself into silence.

“Well then,” Gansey said, far too chipper for four thirty in the fucking morning. Ronan wished Adam were there. “Let’s go meet the dead!”

* * *

There was a poetic irony to Ronan Lynch crawling back to him, even after Kavinsky had died and come back to life. It only proved correct the sickly fascinated part of Kavinsky’s mind that saw them as one in the same.

“Howdy,” Kavinsky said, smiling, still half-naked, dangling over the edge of the second story bannister to watch the other two Raven Boys shuffle inside. “What brings you to these parts?”

Ronan’s face cinched even tighter, if that was even possible. The sight thrilled Kavinsky.

“Hello, Joseph,” Gansey said. He tried on a smile, but it didn’t quite fit. “What have you gotten yourself into?”

“I should be asking you the same thing,” Kavinsky said, snorting. “Henry Cheng? Really?”

“Henry Cheng,” Henry Cheng repeated blandly, stepping up beside him, his ridiculous cans still hanging around his neck. “Really.”

Kavinsky sighed. Ronan and Gansey started up the stairs; Ronan trailed behind just enough. “I’m too sober for this shit.”

“Yeah, about that?” Henry said. He opened his mouth, started to say something, but let it go at the last moment.

“Maybe later,” Gansey said, sensing the tension. “For now, let’s talk about the basics.” He looked at Henry. “Do you have a place we can talk?”

* * *

Ronan couldn’t help but stare at Kavinsky from across the room, face knotted so tightly it physically hurt. Kavinsky, grinning, couldn’t help but stare back.

Of all the things Ronan had expected to happen after Gansey died and after Glendower was found and after the five of them graduated, this was not one of them. Teary goodbyes in front of an airport terminal? Probably. Adam waking up beside him - or, perhaps, him waking up beside Adam - in the dusty loft of St. Agnes? Hopefully. The embarrassing amount of yard work on a house that was still barely his again? God, he didn’t want to be reminded.

But here, in Henry’s bedroom, sitting on Henry’s bed and wearing Henry’s clothes, was the physical manifestation of one of Ronan’s darkest hours. A flesh-and-blood warning sign. The word ‘asshole’ was invented for a reason, and it was for the explicit purpose of being wielded by Ronan’s lips in battle against one Joseph Kavinsky.

“Asshole,” Ronan said, just to verify. Yes, still true.

“Lynch,” Kavinsky said, nodding back.

“You are a piece of shit,” Ronan continued. “You’re lucky you died when you did, because I would have put you into the ground myself.”

Kavinsky rolled his eyes. “No, you wouldn’t’ve. You’re a massive pussy, Ronan Lynch.”

“Ladies, please,” Henry said, grumbling. “You’re cutting into my beauty sleep enough as it is. Can we just figure this out and go to bed so I can hate it all again tomorrow?”

“Apart from the first bit, I agree with Henry,” Gansey said. He manifested his notebook out of nowhere - Ronan couldn’t for the life of him remember seeing him bringing it along (but, then again, he was too busy being angry at Kavinsky’s resurgent existence to do much more than yank open the Pig’s passenger door and shove himself inside) but there it was nonetheless, being pulled apart and thrown to a random empty page by way of Gansey’s deft fingertips. “I’m quite curious as to what happened.”

Kavinsky shrugged. “You’ve read the New Testament.”

“And there it is,” Ronan snapped. “I was waiting for it, you self-aggrandizing piece of--”

“Ronan,” Gansey said sharply.

“Yeah, _Ronan_ ,” Kavinsky said, smiling like sin. “Heel.”

“And you,” Gansey said, turning his ire toward the other side of the room. “Stop trying to avoid this and start talking. While it’s fresh, if you will.”

“Weak,” Henry said, leaning against the closed door. He yawned. “A Jesus metaphor? Poor form, Kavinsky.” He closed his eyes. “I went with Terminator, personally. A more refined reference.”

“You’re a regular Roger Ebert,” Ronan grumbled. Kavinsky laughed.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he yawned, falling to his side and resting his head in the crook of his elbow. He waggled his eyebrows at Ronan when Ronan’s gaze followed him sideways. “I woke up like this, I swear.”

“In the fairgrounds?” Gansey asked. “How? What happened?”

“Fuck if I know.” Kavinsky fell onto his back. Out of the corner of Ronan’s eye, he saw Henry’s jaw flex. “One second I’m repenting for my sins like the good Catholic boy you never were, Lynch, and then the next? I wake up naked on the hood of one of my cars.” He shrugged. “What’s left of it, anyways. What the fuck happened to this town after I died?”

Ronan and Gansey and Henry shared a three-way look. “It’s complicated,” Gansey said, finally, speaking for them all.

Kavinsky snorted. “I don’t doubt that.” 

Gansey swallowed and tapped the back of his pen against the surface of his notebook like a nervous metronome. “Do you,” he started, clearing his throat, “ _feel_ any different?”

That was a great question, Ronan had to admit. Sometimes he’d spy Gansey standing off to the side when he thought nobody was looking, flexing his fingers and staring at them like they weren’t really his. And he supposed they really _weren’t_ , in the grand scheme of things. Cabeswater didn’t make sense. The ley lines didn’t make sense. This Gansey, made out of dream stuff, was much the same.

But making sense of the nonsensical was Gansey’s calling card in life, so when he tilted the pen back around and put the business end to work when Kavinsky started to talk, Ronan wasn’t surprised. Not truly.

“I feel fine,” Kavinsky bit out. “Weird, but fine. I’ve probably got mosquito bites on my dick.”

“Charming,” Henry muttered.

“Shut it, K-pop.”

“You don’t… hear anything?” Gansey was _really_ struggling.

Ronan sighed and sat up straighter. “Can you still dream shit up?”

Kavinsky froze. “Probably?”

Gansey turned to look at Ronan. “It would make sense. You can still dream things up, considering what happened to you.”

“We still don’t entirely _know_ what happened to me, Dick. What happened to any of us, honestly. Have you thought about the fact your girlfriend is part tree?”

With a laugh, Kavinsky righted himself on the bed, letting his legs swing off the edge. “Either I’m high or you are, because it sounds like you just said Gansey has a _girlfriend_.”

“It’s a long story,” Gansey muttered, not entirely paying attention anymore. Instead, he was burrowing through the backlog of his notebook, trying to find something of which only Gansey would know the location. He stopped on a page full of multi-colored pen scribbles. “Aha. Here.”

He turned the notebook and flashed it into Ronan’s face. “What exactly am I looking at?” he asked, but the instant he saw the hasty sketch drawn between the split in the pages, he knew.

“Cabeswater,” Gansey said. “Or, at least, as much of it as I could plot out in the time we had. I think this is a healthy estimation of what it looked like - general footprint, topography, that sort of thing.”

“What’s this got to do with anything?” Ronan said, suddenly angry. It was a strange anger - the kind one felt when one’s secrets were being spilled like blood in front of others. He stole a glare at Kavinsky out of the corner of his eye. Kavinsky just grinned back at him, eerie in his mere existence.

"It helps," Gansey said. "It helps me calm myself when I'm having a bad day. It..." He ran his thumb down the side of the notebook. "It's soothing. I don't know why."

"Because it's you?" Ronan asked. He didn't care about keeping secrets anymore. Kavinsky didn't matter anyways. Besides, this wasn't Ronan's secret to keep.

"I guess so," Gansey murmured. He coughed and shoved the notebook away from himself, into Kavinsky's empty lap. Ronan resisted the urge to flinch on Gansey's behalf. What the fuck was he doing?

"What the hell am I supposed to do with this?" Kavinsky said, holding the book by one page. Scraps of loose paper drifted out from between the cover and the front copy. This time Gansey _did_ flinch.

"Just look at it and tell me if it makes you feel anything," Gansey said, infinitely patient as always. Surprisingly, Kavinsky stilled. He frowned at the diagram.

"It looks like some dopey fantasy map," he grumbled, scowling in disgust. "What is this, some sort of Dungeons and Dragons bullshit?"

Ronan was halfway into leaping off the ground when Kavinsky threw the notebook at his face.

"You know?" he said. He knocked Henry aside, who had fallen asleep on the closed door, and slipped into the hallway. "Fuck this. I need some air."

Henry yawned, looking between the two of them. "Well," he said, after a heartbeat. The front door slammed downstairs. "That went well."

Gansey had the decency to look apologetic. "I'm sorry," he said. "You need to sleep. We'll get out of your hair."

From outside, Ronan heard the suspicious sound of peeling tires. He jerked his head toward the open window.

"Fuck," he said, knowing what had happened before he had the chance to see it for himself. It wasn't the Pig; the Pig required a special finesse that Kavinsky quite frankly wasn't capable of.

"What?" Gansey asked. When Ronan turned and saw the pale expression on Henry's face, he knew he understood, too.

"He just took my car." He ran a hand over his forehead, letting out a sloppy chuckle. "Looks like I have a stake in this race after all, boys. Fold me in."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HOW HAS PRACTICALLY NOBODY ELSE IN THIS ENTIRE FANDOM CONSIDERED CHENGVINSKY
> 
> I have been suffering alone in this rarepair hell for months now, and had no other choice than to rectify the problem myself wcyd
> 
> The title of the fic is a reference to [**this Oingo Boingo song**](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iypUpv9xelg), which I think is especially fitting for Kavinsky. The title of the chapter is a Terminator 2 reference, because I'm hot garbage.
> 
> I've gotten most of the next three chapters already written, so HOPEFULLY I'll be able to maintain a consistent upload schedule for this for the first time in my life! Wow, who would've thought, eh? Go out and buy a lotto ticket, friends, because this is never happening again.
> 
> Follow me on **[Twitter](https://twitter.com/EndoWrites)** ; I desperately need more TRC mutuals. Come scream about Pynch or Chengvinsky with me please I beg of you my crops are dying


	2. Make Like a Tree and Get Out of Here

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> > His hands were shaking when he twisted them into rough fists, fingers burrowing into Cheng’s jacket. Why was he doing this? What was his motive? Did he want Kavinsky’s money? Did he want Kavinsky’s pedigree?
>> 
>> No. No, said the small corner of Kavinsky’s brain he did his best to silence with drugs and bad decisions. He’s as vulnerable as you are. He’s as caught up in this mess as you are. There is a difference between malicious intent and circumstance bringing people together, because otherwise, what’s the point?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note the addition of new tags! It doesn't come up this chapter (at most, it's lightly implied), but there is a scene later on in the fic that might be troubling to some readers. Thank you!

Kavinsky needed air. He hadn't lied about that part. It was a selfish truth - the sort of answer to a question that only a select few could decode. Kavinsky was good at speaking in codes.

Cheng's Fisker clung to the edges of the curvy mountain roads startlingly well. He watched the battery meter fall, fall, fall, then rise, sharp and sudden, when he'd slam his bare foot into the brake pad and let the car drift around a corner, kicking up white-hot, rubbery smoke.

He let out a whoop, head stuck halfway out the open window, the humid Henrietta air twisting and turning over his skin in loose ribbons.

The...  _ thing _ Gansey had shown him. The map? Kavinsky didn't quite know what to make of it. It was like looking through a sea of disjointed shapes, trying to make out a familiar figure, before the perspective would shift and everything would nauseatingly lock into place - and no matter what he did, he couldn't go back to seeing what he'd seen before. And that's what it was: a nausea of recognition. The thought that something, somewhere, understood him better than he understood himself. And nothing -  _ nobody _ deserved that. Kavinsky was a mess in all other ways, but he was careful in this one.

He rode the brake and the gas with both feet, used to a clutch but having no such luck with Cheng's bizarre electric engine. He heel-toed it regardless, letting the car shutter and seize where a gear change would go, letting himself pretend just for a moment.

His first thought was to return to the fairgrounds. Maybe one of his Mitsubishis still worked. Then, from there, he could work towards getting high again, regaining some form of stability from the way his life was before.

The voice of his father, sharp and foreign in his ear, always broke free of his memory in times like these, firing off commands until he couldn't stand it anymore. That was why he drank. That was why he shot up. The numbness was, at the very least, quiet. He could fill the silence with his own noise if he so chose.

In the end, though, the Fisker drove back into town, wove through the empty summer streets, and stopped in front of his old home. He hadn't meant to do that. He hadn't meant to do anything. His actions were still befitting of a drug addict, but he had the wherewithal about him to know how catastrophically flawed they were.

When he stepped out of the car, bare feet soaking into the dewy grass, he wished now more than ever that he wasn't sober.

* * *

"He's just around the corner," Cheng said, pointing, not looking up from his phone.

Ronan had given him the passenger seat in a rare sign of compassion - and, dare he say it, empathy. He knew what a man's car meant to him. He knew what Kavinsky could do.

Surprisingly, though, Henry didn't seem to mind. He looked borderline chipper, still in his pajamas, humming along to whatever classic rock monstrosity the radio happened to be tuned to the last time it had been turned on.

They were weaving through streets on the far side of Henrietta from everything Ronan cared about, past McMansions that looked like castles and strange modern homes built entirely out of glass and combinations of the two that looked about as ugly as one could expect.

Gansey flicked through gear changes like professional, letting the Pig's engine settle at a nice, high-octane, speedy whine. He hadn't said anything since they'd gotten in the car. His eyes were on the road, but his mind was very clearly elsewhere. At least, Ronan thought, he could still follow directions. There was enough Aglionby in his blood to demand  _ that _ much.

"Did you send RoboBee after him?" Gansey said, finally, so late into the drive that Ronan startled when he spoke up.

"What?" Henry asked, frowning. He lit up. "Oh! No. My car has an app for my phone. I can track it that way."

Ronan rolled his eyes. Kids these days.

"Ah, looks like he's stopped," Henry said. He pointed to a road off to the right, and Gansey fussed with the Camaro's controls in preparation for the turn.

Something in Ronan's gut started to boil. He recognized this place. "He went home."

"This is where Kavinsky lives?" Henry said, nearly laughing. "Seriously? I guess he was all bark and no bite. I thought he had money coming out of his ears."

"No," Ronan muttered. He didn't bother resisting the inertia of the turn as the Pig stumbled through the intersection, suspension creaking and whining. "His family's money was never clean."

"And yours was?" Gansey asked, looking at him fiercely through the rear-view mirror.

Gansey chose the strangest moments to show his alliance to Adam Parrish, made all the stranger by the fact he knew the two of them were dating. Gansey had become rather self-aware of his own affluence in the year and change since Adam had joined them, and did his best, in his own Gansey way, to show he had the potential of being someone disassociated with dollar signs.

“Now is not the time,” Ronan bit out. Because  _ yes _ , his own wealth, as inconsequential as it may have been to him, was laden with its own set of problems. And that, along with many other things, was something Ronan did his best to bury in the sand until it wasn’t quite so problematic anymore.

Henry’s car was parked haphazardly against the curb halfway down the otherwise empty street. Gansey visibly deflated in the driver’s seat.

“Well, it looks like it’s in one piece,” he said.

Gansey hit the brakes a little too forcefully once the Pig was double-parked next to the Fisker. Ronan clawed at Henry’s door from the back seat, kicking at the leather like he was suffocating. Henry shot him a bemused look over his shoulder and stepped out into the night.

There was a reason this street was abandoned. There was a reason why Ronan felt uneasy here.

“Oh,” Gansey said. He adjusted his glasses. “Oh. Wow.”

Half of the street was charred rubble. It had happened a few days after the Fourth of July the prior year: a neighborhood lit in flames. The cheap, hasty, particle-board construction of the buildings fell apart like dominoes. It was a nasty affair, one Ronan had already forgotten about, but he had the handy knack of sniffing out inherent suffering in the air like a radiation meter. 

Kavinsky was sitting, leaning against the Fisker’s passenger side door, heels outstretched and planted unevenly against the forgotten, overgrown sidewalk. He was gaunt and hollow in the moonlight.

For the first time since Ronan could remember, Kavinsky looked like uncertainty, like he didn’t already know all the answers. Something primal in Ronan’s gut wanted to turn tail and  _ run _ .

“Joseph?” Gansey asked, creeping toward him like he was a wounded animal. Kavinsky didn’t even look away. His gaze, empty and infinite, still sat heavy on the mound of ash that was once his home.

“She survived,” Gansey continued. “Your mother. She made it out alright.”

Kavinsky laughed. It was an empty, full-body, emotionless tremor. 

“After you died…” Gansey was  _ not _ good at this. “Well, the world had to move on.”

Ronon soured at the thought. He was different from Kavinsky in a lot of ways, in a lot of  _ important _ ways, but this was one of the things that kept him up at night, too; something that tied them together by circumstance and by collective fears more than blood ever could. The terror of being forgotten. It was a heavy weight on the back of Ronan’s neck. It was heavy on the backs of  _ all _ their necks.

Once again, Ronan missed Adam desperately.

“I don’t give a shit about that,” Kavinsky said, and it was obvious he was lying. His voice sounded like gravel. 

Gansey looked between Ronan and Henry, each loosely standing guard on either side of the car. Henry shrugged.

“You’ll need a place to say,” Gansey admitted, and Ronan winced. Of course Gansey would think practically first and emotionally later. He was too much of an old man to do otherwise.

“He is  _ not _ staying with me,” Ronan spat.

“I don’t exactly have a lot of room left these days, either,” Gansey said. “It would be incredibly short-lived.”

“I’m not fucking living with you.” Kavinsky pulled his knees into his chest. “That warehouse sex dungeon of yours reeks of teen angst.”

Ronan and Gansey’s eyes both turned on Henry: Gansey’s in a plea, Ronan in humor.

“Oh,” Henry said. He blinked. “Uh. No?”

“What else is he supposed to do?” Gansey asked. “Sleep in your car?”

Henry scoffed. “He could always make like a tree and get the hell out of  _ all _ our lives.”

“What’s that I hear, Cheng?” Kavinsky said, closing his eyes, choking on a snort. “Did you miss me that much?”

With a roll of his eyes, Henry shoved his hands into his pockets. “Give me my keys.”

“No.” That was Kavinsky: ever infuriating, even when set to barely a low boil.

“I’d feel a lot more comfortable discussing the terms of my imminent house arrest once I know I don’t have to start looking around for a new car,” Henry said, scratching the back of his neck. “Do you know how impossible it is to find parts for this thing, anyway?”

“It’s because it sucks,” Ronan supplied helpfully.

Henry let out a bone-rattling sigh, aging himself fifteen years, despite the Hello Kitty sweatpants. 

“Come on, Cheng,” Ronan said, smirking. They were getting to him. “Aren’t you the one always talking shit about how much more charitable the world needs to be?”

“Yeah, but that’s politics,” Henry whined. “Nobody actually believes their own hype.”

Kavinsky pressed his forehead into the space between his knees. “God, will you three  _ shut up _ .”

Gansey looked at Ronan and mouthed, “ _ Hangover?” _

Ronan shrugged, suddenly  _ very _ tired of dealing with everything. Exhaustion settled around him like a second skin, reappearing from where adrenaline and anxiety had ripped it off his shoulders before. 

They stood in silence, watching Kavinsky, waiting for him to move. But he didn’t. All he did was lay there, eyes closed, face carefully blank. It was a strange sight, to see peace on Kavinsky’s face. But Ronan knew a mask when he saw one.

Finally, after the stalemate lasted for longer than Ronan had the patience for, he stepped back onto the street toward Gansey’s car. “Whatever. I’m taking myself back to bed since you three can’t figure your shit out. Dick, you have the bridge.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Wait-- Ronan, no!”

He was halfway into the Pig’s driver seat and was reaching under the steering column to tickle the wires to get the car to start when Gansey knocked him aside, shoving him out of the way.

“See you later, I guess?” Henry called out. He looked incredibly out of place, but that was Henry. Ronan felt zero sympathy.

“I’m really sorry,” Gansey called out from the window, sliding his key into the ignition and coaxing the engine to turn over. “Text me if you need anything? We can get together later once things have settled down a bit more.”

Henry faked a smile. “I guess?”

With a nod (and a shove from Ronan), Gansey set off.

When Ronan looked behind them, more out of latent curiosity than anything else, he could tell by the immediate glare Kavinsky shot his way that things would be far from settled in the morning.

* * *

Well then.

Henry Cheng solved his problems the same way each time: break down what made them problems to begin with, then attack the smallest thing first. Divide and conquer. There was a reason he always had free time to fuck around in the quad.

“Okay,” he said, rubbing at a nonexistent beard. He would deal with his so-called friends bailing on him at a later time. For now, however, he had to wrestle a loose-cannon teenager with a penchant for self destruction. 

Kavinsky had closed his eyes, resting the back of his head on the side of Henry’s car. “First and foremost, can you stop leaning on my car? You’re going to wear the wax thin unevenly.”

Kavinsky ignored him.

Grumbling under his breath, Henry took a step closer. He didn’t look injured, so that was one less thing to worry about. He just looked  _ tired _ . 

They never really knew each other much in school, if Henry was being honest. They lived different lives that never particularly crossed paths: two orbiting planets, each tidally locked on different sides of the same star. 

And then the human wrecking ball that was Richard Campbell Gansey the Third came through and made a mess of things. Although that, Henry thought, wasn’t exactly his fault. And it wasn’t exactly a  _ bad _ mess. Just different.

Henry reached out with a slippered foot and poked Kavinsky in the shoulder. “Hey. Buck up, buttercup.”

Kavinsky opened one eye and used it (rather effectively) to glare at him.

“Okay, look,” Henry continued, “I know you want a pity party, but you’re kind of doing a terrible job of it, considering you’re leaning against the side of my car instead of sitting inside of it. It’s more productive to do it that way.”

That time, Kavinsky graced him with a glare from  _ both _ eyes.

Henry groaned. “Look, I’m offering to let you stay at my place, okay? Could you stop being so obtuse and get in the car before my sense of humility evaporates and I leave you out here to starve to death in the Henrietta wilderness?”

Kavinsky looked away, toward the rubble that used to be his home. “It’s not a wilderness.”

“Oh.” Henry felt a wave of guilt crash over him like sweat. “Well. I didn’t mean it like that.”

He stood there, soles of his fuzzy socks getting wet from the dew-tipped grass. He was never particularly  _ good _ at this. Usually he was able to crack a joke and that was that, but this time, with Kavinsky, it was obvious what he desperately needed was something Henry always had difficulty with on the best of days: genuine compassion.

But because Henry was destined for politics, he was just as desperate to find a happy medium. When he wrenched open the Fisker’s passenger door, shoving Kavinsky out of the way with a strangled “ _ oof!” _ , he smiled a little to himself.

“Ah, you left the keys in the center console. That was nice of you.” Henry reached forward and plucked them out of the car, dangling them between his fingertips. He looked down at the ground where Kavinsky had fallen over. “Are you coming or not?”

Under normal circumstances, the searing, fire-broiled stare he received in response would have affected him, but Henry, by that point, had plenty of experience dealing with Ronan Lynch’s patented human disaster exposure therapy. 

Henry rolled his eyes and stepped aside, leaving the door open. “Suit yourself. I’m going to go get waffles.”

He had the urge to drive away, to reach over the passenger seat and pull the door closed in Kavinsky’s face from the inside, but Henry knew the game he was playing. This was like trying to catch a feral cat. You had to be patient. 

So he waited, fiddling with the air conditioning controls, grumbling about the tire pressure meter and the low battery and the fact Kavinsky had the nerve to adjust the seat, the jerk, and when he felt the Fisker dip to the side and Kavinsky settle uncomfortably inside, not looking his way, he knew he’d won.

“Close the door,” Henry said. He pulled open the center glove box and pulled out a pair of aviators, sliding them over his face and up over his forehead. His hair was a disaster, and that made him feel a  _ little _ better, despite the fact he now had two pairs of glasses on his head.

“It’s, like, five in the morning,” Kavinsky said, voice hoarse.

“I’m pretty sure I’ve seen you less often with sunglasses on than with sunglasses off,” Henry quipped, gently pushing the Fisker into ‘drive’. “Were you ever even awake under there?”

Kavinsky huffed a quiet laugh, and it was that - not the memory of the destroyed neighborhood - Henry focused on.

* * *

He didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t know what was happening at all. 

Kavinsky watched Cheng drive out of the corner of his eye, fascinated by the simple, puritan way he gripped the steering wheel and checked his mirrors and changed lanes on the highway, careful and precise and calculated. It was simultaneously calming and infuriating.

“Do you even know where the gas pedal is?” Kavinsky asked, despite himself, because Cheng still hadn’t bothered to turn on the radio, and the sound of Henrietta bleeding past them in the silence of an electric car was starting to make him hallucinate.

Cheng glanced at him. “Are you always this cranky?”

“No.”

“I think you’re lying.” He laughed. “Honestly, I’m probably a mess, too. I’ve usually been asleep for a few hours by this point. Do you know the last time I saw the sun rise was?” He wiped under his nose and adjusted his grip on the wheel. “Jesus, probably five years ago.”

Kavinsky turned back toward the window. 

“I’m going to have to take at  _ least _ two catnaps today to stay sane,” Cheng continued. “God, there goes my whole afternoon.”

Kavinsky ignored him.

“But right now I think I’m just hungry, you know?” He was rambling. Kavinsky hated ramblers. “I haven’t eaten anything in a while. And shit, you haven’t eaten anything in, like, a year. That’s gotta be quite the stomach ache. Not any more than being dead was, I’m sure.”

He looked to be halfway through formulating something else to say when Kavinsky looked back at him. Whatever words that sat on his tongue must have died there, because he looked back toward the road, not saying anything else.

They drove in silence, Cheng’s movements in the driver’s seat growing jerkier and more unpredictable as the miles went by and the sun started to rise. For some bizarre, backwards reason, Kavinsky found the chaos soothing.

By the time they were pulling into a cozy little diner on the opposite side of Henrietta, Kavinsky found himself nodding off, and it was that realization, coupled with the Fisker pulling to a stop in the parking lot, that startled him awake again. Or, perhaps, it was Cheng throwing something soft and warm into his lap.

“Here,” Cheng said, still digging around in the dark void that was the backseat. “Put that on. You’re indecent otherwise.”

Kavinsky looked down at himself. Oh. He was still half naked. He held up the offered hoodie - it was dark blue and had the words “VANCOUVER, B.C.” written on the front around a faded red maple leaf.

“I’m not Canadian,” Kavinsky said, because Kavinsky felt the need to say  _ something _ , stupid or not. It was in his blood.

“What?” Cheng looked at him, half dangling in the back seat. “Oh. Who cares? I leave that in here for when I get cold. It’s not exactly rocket science.”

“What the fuck are you even doing back there?”

“Trying to find you my old pair of-- aha!” He leaned back into his seat, holding a pair of old flip flops between his fingers, smiling far wider than was probably necessary.

“I’m not wearing fucking flip flops,” Kavinsky said.

“Well, it’s either flip flops or no waffles.” Cheng didn’t bother waiting for an answer, dropping them at his feet and shoving open his door. “Your choice, dude. And I’m not even going to expect you to pay me back. You can’t even  _ imagine _ the charity right now. I fully expect to write this off on my taxes.”

Kavinsky’s brain went through a game of life-or-death triage, because every problem he’d ever had to face beforehand had been a life-or-death problem. His heart rate spiked as he watched Cheng stroll through the half-lit parking lot, peeling open the diner’s glass door with an embarrassing level of finesse, shooting him a look through the glass entryway as he meandered in and found a seat somewhere in the shadows.

He had no money. He had no family. He had nowhere to go. Everything was wrong. Everything was  _ wrong _ . The world was far, far too sharp in his periphery. His skin felt disgustingly frail. He wasn’t living life two steps ahead of his body, soul disconnected from reality, forced to dance around danger as it happened instead of planning, of thinking, of  _ fearing _ .

His hands were shaking when he twisted them into rough fists, fingers burrowing into Cheng’s jacket. Why was he doing this? What was his motive? Did he want Kavinsky’s money? Did he want Kavinsky’s pedigree?

No. No, said the small corner of Kavinsky’s brain he did his best to silence with drugs and bad decisions. He’s as vulnerable as you are. He’s as caught up in this mess as you are. There is a difference between malicious intent and circumstance bringing people together, because otherwise, what’s the point?

He swallowed. The hoodie was scratchy when he threw it on over his bare shoulders. The flip flops were a size too small; his bare heels connected with the rough pavement when he stepped outside, the night air suddenly strangely cold. He felt soulless. He felt alone.

But he wasn’t. He had an offer - an olive branch. Henry Cheng may have been the boisterous, obnoxious fool from Aglionby, but he was also Kavinsky’s only chance of figuring out what happened. Of figuring out what to do with himself.

At least until he could find a way of not having to figure anything else out at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ronan is NOT happy that Kavinsky is back, lmao. 
> 
> Thank you for reading!! Please let me know what you thought, if you enjoyed! I'm still really loving writing these two dumbasses, lmao.
> 
> Come harass me on **[Twitter](https://twitter.com/EndoWrites)**! I post random snippets of stuff as I'm working on them, if you want a sneak peak into future updates. As it stands now, I'm at Chapter 5, so that's at least another three weeks of consistent updates. I'm very pleased with that!


	3. With Apologies to Jesus Christ

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> > “What the fuck do you know about what happened to me, anyways?” Kavinsky said, raising his voice. “What the fuck do you care?”
>> 
>> “Did you not hear me just now?” Henry said, crossing his arms, raising an eyebrow. He leaned back in his seat, assessing. “You’re an enigma. No-- you’re dead.”
>> 
>> “Obviously not anymore,” Kavinsky said, sneering.

Henry wasn’t even entirely sure whether Kavinsky would follow him inside. 

Maybe it was a bit disingenuous to leave him alone like that, considering he’d already stolen Henry’s car once before and, if his record from before was anything to consider, would be more than willing to do it again should he feel inclined. 

But Henry was a practical man. A practical man with an appetite for waffles. And if waffles couldn’t cure a reborn, suicidal asshole of his latent teenage angst, then what good were they, really?

“Really fucking good,” he groaned, shoving a bite into his mouth and scrolling through an article on humane farming techniques on his phone. There was no rest for the wicked, nor the wickedly inclined; Aglionby hadn’t seen the last of him.

He had plans, of course, to leave for Vancouver again. His mother was already home, having left Henrietta around the same time Gansey had died and come back to life. (What was it with the people around him resurrecting themselves? Maybe the Jesus metaphor  _ was _ apt.) 

But he was too busy figuring out where he sat among this strange, rag-tag new group of friends of his to really care what happened to her, or care about returning home. He was planning an international vacation with Blue and Gansey, and was genuinely looking forward to it. Maybe once he was finished with that he’d move back to Canada and start looking at colleges.

But now? Now, with Kavinsky back, things were bound to change. Henry didn’t know everything quite yet, still a bit wet behind the ears in the friendship-to-Richard-Gansey department, but he knew enough to recognize the sharp look in his eye that said, “This isn’t over yet.” He’d seen it with Glendower, and now he’d seen it just a few hours prior, with everyone gathered in his room.

Henry needed to know if he could trust Kavinsky. Or, more importantly, if Kavinsky was willing to trust him.

He heard the diner’s door chime and did everything he could to stay focused on his food and not turn around. Well - he didn’t have to try all  _ that _ hard. This place was one of his favorites for a reason.

When Kavinsky slid into the booth seat opposite him, looking like a felony, Henry smiled.

“Pleasure of you to join me,” he said, tapping his lips with a napkin.

Kavinsky just looked down at (what was left of) Henry’s plate. “Jesus.”

“Yeah, well, I did say I was starved,” Henry said, leaning forward and waving a hand toward the front of the diner, where a bored waitress sat on her phone. “Excuse me?”

They didn’t speak until Kavinsky had a menu in front of him; he voicelessly pointed to one of the big, glossy pictures of the diner’s pancake plate, and the waitress voicelessly jotted it down in illegible hieroglyphics, as was tradition.

They still didn’t speak when Kavinsky’s order arrived, nor did they speak the entire time they ate, Henry polishing off his waffles and Kavinsky pushing his pancakes around in syrupy circles.

Finally, having reread the farming article twice just to give his eyes something to do, Henry couldn’t stand the silence anymore. With the sun coming up through the window, he felt inspired. “Aren’t you going to finish those?”

Kavinsky looked up, frowning. Silently, he shoved the plate toward him.

“Oh,” Henry said, choking on a laugh. “No, that’s fine. I’ve plenty, thank you. You should eat them. Besides, pancakes are the devil’s breakfast food.”

“Then what?”

“What what?”

“What the fuck are you staring at?” Kavinsky bit out. The kindling of fire in his eyes was relit. Inwardly, Henry found himself strangely proud; it must have been the food.

“Was I staring?”

“ _ Yes _ .”

“Oh,” Henry said, shrugging. “I guess I was, then.”

Kavinsky seemed confused by his answer. Instead of saying anything else, however, he just shifted his glare to the half-stack of pancakes sitting between them.

“You know,” Henry said, empowered, “I’m a bit surprised by you.”

Kavinsky said nothing.

“Because, like, you’re being quite the champ about all of this,” Henry continued. “I’m sure you understand why I’m curious, is all. You’ve been gone for almost a year. Even for all the crazy shit that happens around here, that’s something else.”

“What the fuck do you know about what happened to me, anyways?” Kavinsky said, raising his voice. “What the fuck do you  _ care? _ ”

“Did you not hear me just now?” Henry said, crossing his arms, raising an eyebrow. He leaned back in his seat, assessing. “You’re an enigma. No-- you’re  _ dead _ .”

“Obviously not anymore,” Kavinsky said, sneering. He stood, legs knocking into the sides of the table. The pancakes wobbled.

“Whoa, whoa, watch the breakfast foods,” Henry said. He took a deep breath, held it, let it out. “Just… sit down, alright? We should talk anyways. And you  _ know _ if it’s not me first, it’ll be Gansey. And I don’t exactly want to put you through that on your own.”

“My hero.”

“Yeah, well, don’t get used to it.”

Kavinsky looked ready to bolt, eyes flicking back and forth between the empty diner’s door and Henry’s face. Back and forth, back and forth, like a trapped coyote.

“Please just sit down,” Henry said, rubbing the space between his eyes. He was  _ definitely _ going to have to take at  _ least _ three naps.

Surprisingly, Kavinsky listened. He sat back down in a slow, careful, singular motion.

“Okay,” Henry said, suddenly realizing he hadn’t expected to get this far. “Okay. Alright. Let’s talk, then.”

“About  _ what _ , Einstein.”

“Well,” Henry said, choking on a breath. He licked his lips, looking down at the table. This was hard. “Well! What about you? Don’t you have any questions? Curious who won the World Series this year? The Super Bowl? Stanley Cup?”

Kavinsky blinked slowly, unamused.

“Alright, fine, maybe not sports stuff,” Henry said.

Kavinsky looked down at the table, stiff and synthetic and  _ drained _ . Again, Henry was reminded that he must’ve been battling himself the entire time, trying to figure out truth from fiction.

Henry opted to stay silent, twirling the straw of his drink in loose circles around the rim.

The sun was much higher now, loose beams of light distorting as they passed through the dirty diner’s windows. This was Kavinsky’s first sunrise since he’d died. His first sunrise in eleven months. It felt important, somehow. Symbolic. 

“My mother,” Kavinsky said, so quietly Henry nearly didn’t hear him.

Henry nodded. “She’s alive. I think she’s up in New York City.”

Kavinsky nodded, staring off into the table, like Henry had just told him the weather.

“Aren’t you going to ask about what happened to your neighborhood?” Henry asked.

There was a gaunt, empty chasm in the space behind Kavinsky’s eyes when he raised them to look into Henry’s. His lips twisted into a dangerous smile. “ _ I _ happened to my neighborhood,” he said.

“What does that even mean?”

“Dreams and dreamers,” Kavinsky said. “We’re much the same. We dream a little of ourselves every night. Pull a bit out of our heads every morning. The fire in here” --he pointed to his chest, grinning like a jigsaw blade-- “needs to get out somehow.”

“So, what? You burned it down?” Henry asked, cocking his head to the side. “Why? What? How?”

“It’s called a dead man’s switch,” Kavinsky said, all teeth. “A precaution. I’m not letting anyone into my chocolate factory unless they’re willing to go up in smoke along with it.”

“Oh.” Henry could understand that. He could recognize the fierce protectiveness Ronan felt for his farm, that same sharp angle of terrified cockiness in Kavinsky’s eyes. But Kavinsky’s were more feral. More raw. 

“My neighborhood was just that,” Kavinsky said. “ _ Mine _ . If I was gone, then it was, too. I don’t regret that.”

Henry had the sneaking suspicion that was a lie, but something else that Henry had learned from Ronan Lynch was to not call out a lie when it was one that was necessary.

Kavinsky tore off another chunk of lukewarm, syrup-logged pancake and shoved it into his mouth.

“Well,” Henry said, shrugging, “if I let you stay at Litchfield House, can I expect you to, you know,  _ not _ do that? Maybe take out the garbage every now and then? Restock the milk when we run out? Not torch the place when you’re bored?”

This time, the smile on Kavinsky’s face morphed into something more human. That, for some strange reason, was somehow scarier. “No promises.”

“Hmm.” Henry took a long drag out of his soda. “Yeah, I figured. I hope you’ve got renter’s insurance.”

More silence. This time, it felt less like a ceasefire and more like a treaty. 

“Were you being serious?” Kavinsky asked quietly, once the waitress came by with the check and Henry snatched it up, as if his estranged breakfast guest would somehow manifest an AmEx Black card of his own from the dredges of Henry’s tight-fitting sweatshirt. 

“About what?” he asked, signing his name on the receipt, not looking up.

“Taking me in. Like some sort of lost animal.”

Henry twirled the pen in the air a bit. “Well, you kind of are. If the shoe fits, and all that.”

He handed the receipt and the sticky little binder it came in back to the exhausted waitress, giving her a small little smile in appreciation. They were the only patrons in the diner, but he still felt like they were disturbing something just by being there. Consequences of being a late-night eater, he supposed.

“But yes,” he said, sliding out of the booth, stretching his arms above his head and yawning. “I was serious. All my roommates have left. I’m the only one that’s still in town right now. After graduation, pretty much everyone who was anyone bailed.”

Kavinsky looked at him. “Explains why you’re still here.”

“Ha-ha.” Henry rolled his eyes. “I’ll have you know that I am having a  _ fantastic _ time by myself. It’s relaxing. All work and no play, and all that.”

Surprisingly, Kavinsky laughed quietly. He didn’t say anything else, but Henry didn’t push him further.

When they got in the car, however, Henry could tell there was something on his mind. His fingers rubbed loose patterns into the fabric of his borrowed sweats.

“Proko,” he muttered.

Henry’s breath seized. “Yeah?”

“Is he alive?”

Henry patted the Fisker’s steering wheel, still parked in the lot. “Yeah. Well-- kind of.”

“Kind of?”

He looked at Kavinsky. “You definitely know more about this sort of thing than I do, dude.”

Kavinsky stared, wide-eyed, at his legs. “Where is he?”

Henry let out a quiet breath. “Well, the morning’s young, isn’t it?”

* * *

The Henrietta Assisted Living Facility was as much of a misnomer as one could find in a town full of magical potpourri. It was a glorified dungeon, horribly funded, and it sat far enough away from the city center to be ignored and forgotten, as intended, by the people that lived there. Henry remembered hearing tales of it being haunted his first year in Henrietta, but he never had the gall to test it for himself. There were always more important things to do than prove something already likely to be true.

The Fisker slid into an overgrown parking spot, streets dead quiet and empty for miles. There was a pair of ancient, dented Nissans parked off to the side; one was leaking a considerable amount of oil onto the asphalt. Henry did his best to rein in the speech on proper waste disposal already blossoming on his tongue.

Kavinsky was already standing outside the front door when Henry stepped out of the car, looking up at the poorly-installed sign hanging over the door. “‘Welcome home’,” he read. “It’s missing half the letters.”

“This place isn’t exactly Disneyland,” Henry said, laughing. He locked the Fisker with a flourish over his shoulder and pulled open the foggy glass door, mockingly holding it open for Kavinsky.

The inside of the assisted living facility smelled like a hospital, like Lysol wipes and sterile latex and the sweet, unpleasant tinge of death. The lobby was empty; the carpeting was coming up at the edges of the room, and the furniture, framed by fake flowers in fake jars that still looked like they were wilting, was three decades out of date.

At the front, sitting behind the desk, was a portly woman dressed in scrubs. She was reading a newspaper and drinking out of a flask.

The door slammed shut behind them and the woman jerked upright, eyes wide. “What? Who? Who are you?”

“We’re here to see a friend of ours,” Henry said amicably, leaning forward against the desk. “Grigor Prokopenko? He should be here under the custody of the Lynch family.”

Henry felt rather than saw Kavinsky seize up at Ronan’s family name, but did nothing to mention he noticed. 

“Yeah, okay,” the nurse said, digging through a stack of dusty manila folders stacked in a massive pile on the far side of the desk, long forgotten. She pulled one out and flipped through it quickly, eyebrow raised. “Huh.”

“What?”

“Ah, nothing.” When she stood, her chair let out a groan of relief. “Come with me, I guess.”

They followed her down a brown-painted, sickly-looking hallway with no windows and a myriad of doors, walking until the first hallway curved into another and then walking some more.

“He’s been here since… well,” Henry said under his breath, walking alongside Kavinsky. “We were a bunch of dipshit kids, so there wasn’t much we could do to care for someone in a coma like this. Gansey recommended assisted living, and this was the only place around, so.”

Kavinsky grunted but said nothing, folding his hands into the pockets of his sweatpants.

The nurse stopped in front of a nondescript door halfway down the next hallway, looking at the number on the door and at the number written in the folder. “Okay,” she said. “Here you go. Don’t yell too loud, or you’ll wake up Maryanne.”

Not knowing who Maryanne was in the slightest, Henry turned on his ten thousand watt smile and nodded. “Absolutely. We wouldn’t want that.”

“Don’t expect all that much,” the nurse muttered, and walked away. 

The door was unlocked when Henry tried the handle, and it opened for them with a whistling creak. 

The room was spartan and built like an old college dorm, with a small desk in the corner underneath a curtained window and a dresser and chair in the space next to the door. Against the far wall, barely an arm’s reach away from the entrance, was a bed. On the bed was Prokopenko.

He was asleep, chest rising and falling and rising and falling, impossibly fragile. There was a stack of clothes near his bedside, most likely left by a nurse, and a loose sheet tossed over his shoulders. It looked natural. It looked  _ okay _ .

Kavinsky said nothing, taking the three steps to walk across the room. He leaned down and sat at the foot of Prokopenko’s bed, gentler than Henry had ever seen him act. 

“What about Swan?” Kavinsky asked. In the room’s dead silence, the words sounded crisp on his tongue.

“We have no idea,” Henry said. “Was he… one of yours, too?”

Kavinsky hummed; maybe it was a laugh, maybe it wasn’t. He patted Prokopenko on the leg. “They all were,” he said.

Henry settled into the chair, ignoring how stiff it felt against his back. He was still wearing pajamas, he realized, looking down at his filthy slippers. No wonder the nurse gave them strange looks when they walked into the building.

And that was the other thing. Kavinsky had  _ nothing _ . He didn’t even have the clothes on his back. The rooms back at Litchfield were fully furnished, mainly because for his roommates it was cheaper to abandon everything and start over somewhere else than lug it across the country to college, but that didn’t set aside the fact that he was going to need clothes. Food. Probably a phone, too, considering they’d need to stay in contact. Not to mention--how the hell was he going to get a job or fold himself back into society as someone legally deceased? How did that even work?

Henry had a suspicion that he and Gansey were going to need to have a long, candid conversation with their family attorneys. 

But Kavinsky didn’t seem to be worrying about any of that. He was just staring down at the warm shell of a human being curled into a ball on the bed, watching it breathe. In, out. In, out.

“He didn’t wake up,” Kavinsky said.

“No,” Henry said. “I guess he didn’t.”

“He was supposed to.” His voice cracked down the middle. “That’s how this works. That’s how it’s always fucking worked.”

Henry raised an eyebrow. “How many people in this town are technically zombies? Jesus.”

Kavinsky’s fist clenched into the fabric of Prokopenko’s sheets.

“We could always ask Ronan,” Henry suggested. “He’s been working on something--”

“I don’t want to fucking deal with Ronan fucking Lynch!” Kavinsky leapt to his feet, sweeping the stack of hospital clothes off the dresser and kicking them onto the floor. He shoved a finger into Henry’s chest so hard he could feel Kavinsky’s heartbeat. “Don’t fucking talk to me. Don’t fucking  _ look _ at me.”

And then he was gone, smashing open the door and smashing it closed, leaving Henry alone in a room with a dream.

He heard the wailing of an old woman next door and realized, tangentially, that they’d woken up Maryanne.

* * *

Kavinsky was very good at making himself disappear. It was a skill he toned like a muscle, exercising it carefully and regularly and on a strict schedule. 

It didn’t take too much effort to slip away from the assisted living facility and into the woods, and it took even less effort to find the low-life underbelly of Henrietta that clung to its shadows.

His old suppliers were evergreen. They had been there before he started using, and they would be there long after he died - well, died again. Henrietta was as much a product of its circumstances as Richard Gansey’s mystery gang.

He could have always dreamt up his supply. That was what he did most of the time anyways. But sometimes he had an itch for the classical methods. And sometimes he was afraid of sleeping.

The drug den underneath the freeway overpass close to Aglionby was exactly the same as he remembered it, a trash-heap of garbage and people and bad decisions. He approached carefully, minding his step, desperately aware of the half of his feet hanging outside of his flip flops, and looked through the crowd of people for a shock of green-blue hair he recognized.

The man’s name was Juaquin. He owed Kavinsky a favor - multiple, in fact. Kavinsky was also very good at gathering favors. Now, without so much as a stick of gum to his name, they were proving to be his most valuable currency. 

He pulled his hood over his head, keeping his eyes on the prize. Talking too much here wouldn’t be the worst, but it also wouldn’t be the best. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, Joseph Kavinsky was dead. He hadn’t yet had the time or the energy to decide if that was for the best. Until then, keeping all options open was probably a good idea.

Juaquin was halfway through a bowl of fried rice, scrolling through something most likely perverse on his phone. His clothes looked far too clean and far too expensive for a highway overpass, but that was just Juaquin’s style. Kavinsky had one, too, so he never had much of a need to judge others’.

“Hey there, Canada,” Juaquin said, swiping a strand of long, multi-colored hair behind his ear. Right - he was still wearing Henry’s ridiculous jacket. “Looking for a good time?”

“Is that what you’re calling it these days?” Kavinsky replied, pulling the hood off his face.

Juaquin dropped his phone, but had the sense to keep his grip on his food. “Jesus--”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve already gotten that one,” Kavinsky said. “Look. I’m here to collect. This messiah’s been away for a little longer than three days and needs a pick-me-up.”

“Dude, the pills I sell don’t have expiration dates,” Juaquin said, arguing, it seemed, just for the sake of having something productive to say. He still looked shell shocked.

“They do when they go up in smoke with everything else.” Kavinsky grinned in that special way that never made it more than halfway up his face. “So how about it?”

“Man, I don’t know,” Juaquin said. He looked around. “Where’s your posse? I haven’t seen them in months, either.”

“My wise men are otherwise indisposed,” Kavinsky said, leaving a little bite to his voice. 

“Shit. Alright.” Juaquin set his food down and pulled his backpack over his shoulders. His long hair caught on the strap and he winced a little. “I don’t exactly have a fuckton of the shit you like to do, man, but I think that says more about you than it says about me.”

“It’s called supply and demand,” Kavinsky said, watching Juaquin sort through his stuff and pull open a secret flap at the bottom of his bag, a little slow. He was stalling. “It’s rude to keep a dead man waiting.”

“It’s not much.” Juaquin pulled a small baggie of purple pills out from a sea of others and set them on top of the makeshift table of milk crates next to his fried rice. He dumped the rest of his stash into his bag, all blues and greens and orange capsules Kavinsky could  _ taste _ the pain in. “This’ll have to do for now, dude.”

Kavinsky clicked his tongue and pulled it toward him, shoving it into his pocket. “Actually,” he said, “I think I’ll be collecting on  _ all  _ my debts.”

“But--” Juaquin’s eyes went wide. “What? Dude. Fuck. No. I can’t do that. You’ll clear me out for weeks. I have regulars that are expecting--”

“That sounds like something  _ distinctly _ not my problem,” Kavinsky said, smiling. He reached into Juaquin’s backpack and pulled the rest of the pills out himself, folding through them like they were stacks of cash and not hard narcotics. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

Juaquin swallowed. Kavinsky folded his hood back over his head and started to walk away. 

“Were you really dead?”

Kavinsky smirked, not looking back. “Who says I was ever truly alive?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!! This chapter is probably my favorite so far. Writing the difference between jaded, emotionally exhausted Kavinsky and Kavinsky "in his element" is a lot more fun than I thought it would be.


	4. Don't Diss Homer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> > “Well, it’s been a few hours,” Henry said, “so let’s assume he’s already gotten himself a decent-sized stash. Where would he be? Where _could_ he be?”
>> 
>> Gansey looked across the building, toward the door next to Ronan’s that had not been touched in three months.
>> 
>> “Where else would the dead go?” he asked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for suicide attempt at the end of this chapter.

Ronan didn’t remember falling asleep, didn’t remember dreaming, and didn’t remember waking up. The hours after Kavinsky were such a mindless, confusing blur that briefly, without any reason to think otherwise, Ronan was starting to think  _ that _ was the dream.

Then he unfurled his clenched fists and found a bone-white Mitsubishi Evo Matchbox car sitting on his palms, and this dream became just as much a reality as the rest of them.

He spent the night at Monmouth, sleeping on the bare mattress in what used to his room before Gansey had gone and sold everything to fucking Aglionby of all fucking places. For his benefit, no less. Sleeping in that room was a bizarre feeling, now - a mix between feeling like the place was exclusively his, that he held a certain power over its fate, and feeling like nothing was his. Not even the Barns. Not even himself.

He stumbled out of his room, still dressed in a cacophony of blacks and frowns, and found Gansey exactly where he’d left him the night before: on the floor, legs propping open his notebook and hands burrowed deep within a stack of various books on ley line theory. He hadn’t started packing his research materials yet. Ronan suspected he’d wake up one day and it would all be gone, whisked away in a magical cavalcade of its own.

“You know,” Gansey said, not looking up from his book, “I had to learn how to read Yiddish to read some of these, and yet I still couldn’t get above a B in Latin.”

“It helps when your teachers aren’t actively trying to murder you,” Ronan said.

Gansey pouted, running a hand through his hair. “It didn’t matter for you.”

“That’s the most fucking crazy school-related thing I’ve ever heard, and I’m dating Adam fucking Parrish.”

“Yes,” Gansey said, smiling a little, looking away. “Speaking of, I asked him to come over later. He hasn’t gotten my text yet - or, if he has, he hasn’t responded to it yet, at least - but I’m assuming he’s free this afternoon?”

Ronan flexed his jaw. Of course he’d memorized Adam’s work schedule for the next three weeks. Of _ course. _ He just wasn’t entirely certain he wanted to reveal that quite yet. “I have no clue.”

“Hmm. Well, we’ll just have to wait and see, then. I take it you don’t have anything exciting going on?”

“You know, Gansey, I think I left my list of exciting things to do in Henrietta on the ground next to where you, you know, died.”

Gansey snorted. “You’re just as much a stormchaser as I am. Don’t try and play the suburban housewife card.”

Ronan choked on his tongue. 

The front door downstairs split open like an earthquake, blasted into the wall like a strike of lightning, and, after the thunder of footsteps up the stairs, the imminent storm that was Henry Cheng appeared in the upstairs landing, looking haggard and dirty and downright ridiculous.

“I lost him,” he panted. “He ran off again.”

“Well, judging by the fact you made it here by sundown, I’m going to assume he didn’t steal your car this time,” Ronan remarked.

“I…” Henry patted himself down, as if that proved anything. “Huh. Yeah. I guess you’re right.”

Gansey unfolded himself from the ground in a series of popping joints and old man noises, which Ronan found particularly fitting. “What exactly happened?”

“Well, after you two so kindly left me on the side of the road with the Joker,” Henry said, “I took him to get something to eat. To talk.”

“Kavinsky’s more of a Green Goblin,” Ronan said, even though nobody was listening.

“I’m assuming you did most of the talking?” Gansey asked, smiling.

Henry nodded solemnly. “Of course. Then he got all misty-eyed about Prokopenko, so I offered to take him to the assisted living place to show him how he was doing.”

“Oh,” Gansey said, looking visibly enthralled. He gave Ronan a pointed, questioning glance. “Was he awake when you got there?”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Henry said. “He wasn’t.”

Ronan raised an eyebrow. “He’s supposed to be.”

“See, that’s what Kavinsky said, too.” Henry shrugged. “And when I mentioned maybe we should come back here to ask  _ you _ about it - you know, the only other person we know of that knows how any of this dream nonsense works - he blew up on me and ran off.”

“And here you are,” Gansey finished.

“And here I am,” Henry agreed. He let out a long, deflating sigh and slumped against the couch at the corner of the room. “Ugh. I need, like, six showers and a margarita.”

Ronan’s jaw flexed. “Proko  _ should  _ have woken up. His dreamer is alive again.”

“There’s a lot about ley line science we just don’t understand yet,” Gansey said. “You have no idea if that’s the tie or not. It could just as easily be something completely unexpected.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Ronan grumbled. “I’ve been working on this shit for months now. The only thing that can wake up a dream is its dreamer. That’s how it works. That’s how it  _ has  _ to work.”

He didn’t say the unspoken, that if even a dreamer couldn’t wake up a dream, what  _ really  _ was tethering them to reality? But from the hopeless look he spotted in Gansey’s eye, Ronan could tell that he wouldn’t have to.

“This is a problem,” Gansey said, and Ronan just sneered.

“What’s up with him?” Henry asked in a stage whisper, staring right at Ronan.

“Oh, he’s just upset because all of this is going to inevitably cut into his time with Adam on his day off today,” Gansey said, as though it was obvious.

Ronan squawked, scandalized. “What?”

“Oh, good, I’m glad he’s coming,” Henry said. 

“ _ Why?” _

“Oh, hush, you can snog your Ivy League princess later,” Henry said. “This involves him, too.”

“In all actuality, Adam’s probably the  _ only _ one out of the four of us that has any chance of figuring this out,” Gansey said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his shorts. “He has a direct connection to the ley line, for better or worse.”

“Yeah, because  _ I  _ dreamt it,” Ronan argued.

“You may have built the smeltery,” Gansey said, “but you didn’t build the skyscrapers the steel was used for.”

“Okay,  _ Cornelius Vanderbilt. _ ”

“He was railroads, not steel. Seriously, Ronan, you should have attended class more often.”

* * *

Henry loitered around Monmouth waiting for Adam to show up, if loitering meant ‘falling asleep half-draped over the edge of a couch.’ He was awake one moment, listening to Ronan and Gansey arguing with each other in the same condescendingly, brotherly way they always did when Ronan was in a good mood, and the next, he was staring into the face of the reason for that good mood, trying to blink the sleep out of his eyes and right himself on the sofa before he fell off.

“Oh,” Adam said, frowning, retracting his hand from where he’d used it to push at Henry’s shoulder. “Sorry. I didn’t realize you’d been asleep for a while.”

“Best sleep I’ve gotten in ages,” Henry groaned, joints welded together, aching to sit up properly. His clothes looked like shit. He felt like he’d gone cross-country hiking in his underwear. Everything was dirty and sweaty and unpleasantly rigid in places it probably shouldn’t have been. He was going to need to burn his wardrobe and start over - the nuclear option. “Where’s your other half?”

Adam shrugged, but it was clear from his posture that he was wondering the same thing. The reason behind him being woken up made a lot more sense. “Dunno. You were the only one here when I got here.”

‘When was that?”

“Like, twenty minutes ago?”

“What?” Henry bolted upright. He looked toward the wall where Gansey’s old clock used to hang, remembered it was in a box now that Monmouth was in escrow. “Why didn’t you wake me up? Have you been staring at me this whole time?”

“You looked legitimately exhausted,” Adam said, and Henry remembered that of all of them, Adam was the most familiar with that sort of thing. 

“Well, I’ve had a bit of a night,” Henry said, falling back against the sofa, into the little gash of warmth he’d carved out for himself when he’d fallen asleep. 

“So I’ve heard.” Adam fussed with a chapped lip, tilting forward, backward, forward on his heels. “So. Kavinsky, huh?”

“Yep,” Henry said. “Don’t say his name three times in a row or he’ll show up in your bathroom mirror in the middle of the night.”

Adam laughed, strolling toward the other half of the couch that Henry wasn’t curled up against. “That would probably help us out more than anything right now,” he said. “Since we need to track him down.”

Henry shrugged, biting back a yawn. “You are more than welcome to give it a try. If you don’t mind me, I’m going to sit here and try and fade into the upholstery.”

“That bad?”

“That bad,” Henry said, groaning. “Firstly, he ordered  _ pancakes _ . At a  _ Waffle House _ .”

Adam snorted. “The horror.”

“I know, right?” Henry scrubbed at his face with the back of his hand. It smelled like old lady spit. Maryanne was  _ not _ very interested in letting people leave the assisted living facility, he came to discover. “And that’s after stealing my car.  _ And _ my car hoodie.”

“How will you ever survive?”

Henry eyed him from over where his fingers were scrubbing at the sleepiness in his face. “You’ve been hanging out with Ronan too much.”

“Thanks,” Adam said, beaming. “Well, at least we know Kavinsky’s still around here somewhere. And we know that he likes attention too much to not make a big show of things at some point or another.”

“Wow, I feel better already.”

The front door opened to Ronan and Gansey, still arguing, obviously struggling with something in their arms. 

“Classical Greek poetry was told sequentially, Ronan. It wasn’t until later that it was actually transcribed. I thought you knew that.”

“I’m not saying it wasn’t,” Ronan said. “But don’t fucking call Homer a shitty writer when he wasn’t even one fucking guy. You’re calling the whole, like, process shitty instead. Just diss the entire country’s cultural history flat-out like a self-respecting piece of shit if you want to trash the Iliad.”

Henry and Adam shared a look.

“And we wonder how they’re friends,” Henry said blandly.

Ronan stomped up the stairs loud enough for the two of them, and when they stepped into the living room, carrying two boxes of Nino’s pizza each, Henry almost felt like he hadn’t been harboring a suicidal maniac for the prior twelve hours.

“Morning, sleeping beauty,” Ronan grunted at Henry. For Adam he gave only a look, eyes saying something unspoken, and then smiled, infinitesimally. 

“For the record,” Adam said, raising an eyebrow, “Homer is an acquired taste.”

“Of fucking course  _ you’d _ say that,” Ronan groused. 

“Because I’m right.”

“Is that pizza?” Henry asked, knowing full well that it was. He stood in one fluid, flamboyant motion, doing his best to pop every single vertebrae on his spine in the process. Ronan made a face.

Gansey shrugged, setting the box on the table and pushing it half-heartedly towards him. “Brain food,” he said.

“Thank god. I haven’t eaten anything but waffles in the past, what, day?” He tore off a pair of conjoined slices and shoved both of them, folded in half, into his mouth at once. “Oh, thank Jesus.”

“You’re not even religious,” Ronan sniped.

“Yeah, well, I’m thinking about it,” Henry said. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Or, like, at least just hunger and thirst.”

“I bought a bottle of Coke, too,” Gansey added helpfully.

They ate mostly in silence; Ronan stole Henry’s spot on the couch before he could take it back, but in exchange, Henry ate enough pizza to feed a small army, so in the end it was a fairly even trade, really. Ronan didn’t seem to be too concerned about it, regardless.

“Stop poking me,” Adam said. “I’m trying to think.”

“I’m not poking you,” Ronan grumbled, reclining across the couch to rest his face in Adam’s lap. “I’m resting.”

“Your bony-ass nose is digging into my thigh.” Adam shoved him. “At least pick a direction and stick with it.”

“Ah, love,” Gansey said, and the look they each shot him in return was so startlingly in sync that he nearly choked on a bite of his own pizza.

“I don’t even know where to begin,” Henry said. He picked up one of Gansey’s books and wrinkled his nose at the title. “What is this? Yiddish?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Gansey said, perking up. “Do you know anything about Yiddish? I can send you some texts--”

“If this has anything to do with the ley line,” Adam said, helpfully interrupting, “then there’s a good chance I can find it. Or, at least, figure out what started everything. There’s got to be a catalyst. Right?” He looked down at Ronan, who was still staring up at him from his lap.

“How the hell should I know? You’re the Disney princess. Go talk to your mountain springs or whatever.”

“Alright,” Henry said. “Fabulous. Groovy. Let’s say we decode all of this magical nonsense and figure out what happened, why Kavinsky reappeared in the first place.” He frowned. “What then? What are we supposed to do?”

“With what?” Ronan asked blandly.

“With  _ him _ ,” Henry said.

Ronan shrugged; from Adam’s lap, it just looked like he convulsed a little on the couch. “Who cares? He’s always managed to get himself out of trouble before this. I mean, the fact he’s alive at all makes that pretty fucking obvious. He’ll be fine.”

Henry swallowed. “I don’t think so,” he murmured, looking down at his lap. “Not this time.” The pizza was settling strangely in his stomach. “I just… worry, you know? Something about this is unsettling.”

“Everything in this town is unsettling,” Gansey said. He sounded amazed, not annoyed.

“I agree with Henry,” Adam said. “What?” he added, when Ronan poked him in the stomach.

“You’re not supposed to do that,” Ronan grumbled. 

“I’m  _ supposed _ to do whatever I damn well feel like,” Adam said, poking him back. “Don’t be obtuse.” He looked back up, face synthetically sweet. “We do need to find him, though. We need to figure this out. At the very least, he might be able to help figure out a way to wake up dormant dream things.”

“Or,” Gansey said, a little quiet, a  _ lot _ serious, “Cabeswater.”

The four of them were silent for one heartbeat, two heartbeats.

“Yeah,” Adam said, finally. He cleared his throat. “Well. Where do you reckon he’s run off to?”

“Probably to get pills,” Ronan said.

“Why? He can just dream them up himself, can’t he?”

Ronan just shrugged.

“Well, it’s been a few hours,” Henry said, “so let’s assume he’s already gotten himself a decent-sized stash. Where would he be? Where  _ could _ he be?”

Gansey looked across the building, toward the door next to Ronan’s that had not been touched in three months.

“Where else would the dead go?” he asked.

* * *

When it came to cemeteries, Henrietta was spoiled for choice.

There was the Catholic cemetery, built behind St. Agnes in an asymmetric, half-circle blob, fenced off from the parking lot by low-rising shrubbery and a stone wall that looked, somehow, older than the rest of the church. Kavinsky was rather familiar with this church, in much the same way he was familiar with Ronan Lynch: it was privy to his dark, tormented nights, when the sun would bleed together with the moon in his mind and he’d wake up in the same place he fell asleep a week later, buried in fallen leaves next to a tombstone he could have  _ sworn _ wasn’t there when he sat down.

There was the Methodist cemetery, all prim and proper and organized by year, in neat, strict lines. The Methodist cemetery was good in a pinch, but Kavinsky had to admit he found the atmosphere creatively stifling. Plus, the parking lot was gated and he didn’t like leaving his car out of sight.

There was the Baptist cemetery, but Kavinsky, even in his most drunken of benders, didn’t dare cross into the Baptist cemetery uninvited. 

It was the fourth cemetery - the unmarked, forgotten one at the back of the public park, buried behind a thin strip of trees - where Kavinsky found himself instead, pockets full of pills, holding a handle of gin he’d traded from a homeless person outside of a liquor store on his way over.

He looked down at the fresh grave, the granite gravestone still too new to look anything less than a year old, and traced his own name with a shaky fingertip. Surreal.

Kavinsky was familiar with graves. He was even familiar with stepping inside of them, robbing corpses for inspiration, leaving piles of looted jewelry outside the front gates for the less fortunate to pilfer and do with as they pleased. He was particularly good at covering up the evidence of his besmirchment. Kavinsky and the dead were on a first-name basis.

But for some reason, he wasn’t particularly interested in pulling out his own corpse. Was it even there? Did anything of his old body remain after he’d died? 

Then there were the finer details. What did his family put him in when they locked him in his casket? A suit? Was there enough of a form left to put a suit  _ on _ ? What was he buried with? What did the ceremony look like?

He didn’t deserve to know. Not truly. He didn’t deserve it, and he didn’t want it. The perfect compromise.

Yet he was still drawn to the place, drawn there the moment he’d finished cashing in favors and obtaining enough narcotics to ruin several lives. It felt fitting, really.

His family hadn’t been particularly religious. His mother had always carried a cross-shaped necklace with her, left forgotten at the bottom of the side pocket of one of her purses, but every time he’d raid her wallet for spare cash to buy liquor in the years before he figured out how to dream it up himself, it was always there, always judging him.

He half expected to find that cross around his dead body’s neck, should he look. Just to judge him one last time.

It was only fitting that they choose this cemetery to bury him. It was fitting that they bury him at all, rather than cremate whatever he hadn’t already cremated himself. A forgotten, godless cemetery for a forgettable, godless boy.

He’d taken Prokopenko here, once. Taken him here to explain things, to dance around a campfire with liquor on their breaths and the sharp high-beams of the Mitsubishi’s headlights biting into the darkness around them. This was where he was when Proko first discovered he was a dream thing. This was where he was when he first dreamed Proko in the first place.

Kavinsky let his hands squeeze tight around the glass bottle. His knuckles barely changed color.

Maybe he didn’t need to look in his grave to find his own buried body. Maybe he just needed to look closer at himself, at the invisible scorch marks on his skin that he could feel, sometimes, when he let crystal-clear thoughts fester in his mind.

And that was what the alcohol was for, he supposed. That’s what the pills were for. But they had a greater purpose, too. An ultimatum. 

He knew his limits. He could take three of the blue pills and two of the reds before anything bad would happen, and even then, Kavinsky was careful about leaving room for error. The alcohol was always there, a constant, just to wash the flavor away. 

He didn’t need to raid his own grave, no. For once, Kavinsky was glad he had a place in the earth that was marked for him and not someone else, a place to fall asleep that wasn’t particularly sinful for bringing things to life that were  _ especially _ sinful. This was his place, his alone.

He counted out sixteen blue pills and fifteen reds, lined them up across the top of his headstone, scooped them into his hand and downed them all at once.

When he laid down, mirroring a body he couldn’t see, couldn’t verify, the only thing he thought was that at least this time there would be no doubts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor Kavinsky, man. He's such a messy, fucked-up character. 
> 
> Also - I know that in the books, Prokopenko was supposedly _not_ a dream thing originally, but I interpret that as meaning the original Proko died somehow and Kavinsky replaced him with a version from his own mind. Hence the scene at the end. Just a personal headcanon, though.
> 
> Now we're getting into the meat and potatoes of this fic!! I still have no idea how long this is going to end up being, but I do know that a lot of what happens in the next few chapters is what I was excited to write when I first thought up the idea for this fic, so I'm both jazzed AND anxious to work on those scenes, lol. This is actually the end of my backlog (I've spent most of the past two weeks working on revising my novel again) but hopefully I'll still have chapter 5 ready to go next Saturday so I can keep up the pace. I'm really proud of myself for managing to actually update on a schedule for once, and I want to keep it up.
> 
> Thanks for reading!!!


	5. Warning: Task Failed Successfully

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> > “This could be the ley line. Directly. No middle man this time.”  
> “Are we sure that’s how this works?” Ronan asked.  
> Gansey smiled, eager and bright. He pocketed the leaf. “No.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: this chapter has a detailed description of a person being rescued from a suicide attempt.

“Don’t push it too hard, Gansey,” Adam warned, as the Pig thundered down the interstate. “You’ll flood the carbs.”

Through the rear-view mirror, Gansey shot Ronan a look that screamed  _ I told you so _ . “Where did you say this place was again?” he asked, instead of saying anything else.

“It’s past the old part of town,” Ronan said, leaning into the C-pillar, looking out the Camaro’s side windows. Henrietta rolled by like a train in shades of green and grey.

“Did you go there often?” Henry asked, sounding genuinely curious. That was Henry - naive until the end, but only as long as he wanted to be.

“I don’t know, Henry, I was usually too busy trying not to let him goad me into doing something stupid to give a shit  _ where _ we were.”

From the passenger seat, Adam clenched his jaw.

“We’ll find him,” Gansey said. “The first step to a solution is making sure we’re all in the same place.”

“Yeah?” Ronan asked, snorting. He kicked Gansey’s seat from behind. “And how do you know, exactly, that he’s not going to just jump ship again once we finally need him to do something other than be a colossal pain in the ass?”

He didn’t want to say it, but Kavinsky unsettled him.  _ This _ Kavinsky unsettled him, with his empty stares and his hollow eyes and a feral smile that looked aftermarket.

Henry let out a sigh that could have moved mountains, shoving his face into his palm. “He won’t.”

“Excuse me?”

“He won’t,” Henry said, looking Ronan dead in the eye. “I won’t let him. Not this time.”

“Yeah, because that worked so well before.”

“Look.” Henry took a moment, waiting for Gansey to downshift as they peeled down an off-ramp. In the distance, the ghoulish, towering victorian homes of old Henrietta loomed. “I didn’t understand before, but I think I do now. He’s hurt. He’s a bit like a dog that’s broken its leg, you know? He’ll bite and snarl and rip you to shreds if you let him, but the only thing he’s going to do if left to his own devices, without help, is make things worse. Hurt himself worse.”

“Kavinsky hurts himself,” Ronan said. “That’s what he does.”

This time, it was Adam that looked at him through the mirror. “That doesn’t mean it’s okay, Ronan.”

“Oh, you too?”

“Me  _ especially _ ,” Adam said, turning in his seat. “Kavinsky had demons, too.  _ Has _ demons. His just aren’t as easy to punch in the face.”

“Because that turned out so shitty the first time,” Ronan bit back. He regretted the words the moment they left his mouth, the moment they sunk into Adam’s skin and twisted it around like a physical blow itself.

“Gansey,” Adam said, still glaring at him, “pull over.”

Gansey twisted his wrists around the steering wheel. “We’re almost there,” he said quietly.

“Now, please.”

The Pig meandered its way to the emergency lane on the frontage road, slowing to a stop on a patch of burnt, brown grass. Adam was up and out before Gansey had even put the car in neutral.

“Next time,” he said, pointing a finger at Ronan through the open door, “when it’s your ass that’s out there doing God knows what, maybe you’ll be lucky the rest of us are more considerate.”

And then he slammed the door, and Ronan felt even shittier than before.

Gansey kept driving without saying another word, and Ronan absolutely, definitely, 100% didn’t watch Adam disappear around a wall of trees when the Pig took a turn. 

He slunk back into his seat and crossed his arms, fuming. Fuck Joseph Kavinsky.

* * *

Kavinsky liked to believe he had a greater measure of control over his dreams than he did reality. Most of the time, however, it was the other way around, and even then, Kavinsky’s power was always superficial. He was a king in a republic, an emperor of one. 

Sometimes he dreamed from the third person. He’d follow behind a vaguely Kavinsky-shaped entity, watch them navigate some maze of immature thought, pulling strings like a puppetmaster. When he needed something, something in the environment around his avatar, he would reach down and grab it, and when he awoke, it would be sitting there, in his arms, plucked from his mind. Easy, easy, easy.

Sometimes it was Kavinsky in the driver’s seat of a car, halfway through an unstarted race, the horizon forever unreachable, his opponents forever matched. Those dreams were strange, because they weren’t necessarily dreams in the first place: they were just bizarre fevers where reality leaked through, burrowing through the sheet of loose-leaf paper that was Kavinsky’s psyche until there was a hole in the middle, red-rimmed and bleeding, somewhere that his heart should be.

And then there were these dreams: the dreams he could never tell were dreams at all. The sun was high in the sky, certainly; the sun sometimes did that in his mind, too, but sometimes it didn’t. That wasn’t a sign; it was just another variable to be considered. It still felt warm.

He was still sitting on his grave, chest rising, falling, rising, falling. Right. Perhaps that was the key. If he was breathing, he was dreaming. Kavinsky’s body in reality would no longer have that luxury. He didn’t know how much time he had before the effects of the drugs cut into his dreaming, but time was just another variable when he dreamed.

The sky was deep, deep blue; the kind that always felt so fake until summer came along each year and proved him wrong. Another variable, another unknown.

He felt… sick. Strangely so. He tried to move, to inch his way off the grave, but he couldn’t. That was fine. Sometimes the dreams locked him down. He’d just have to try again later. 

The sickness built up in his chest, something sticky and warm and unnatural. He tried to clear his throat, tried to purge the nausea and the growing fear that he was going to choke to death, drown on his own bile. He still couldn’t move. 

A flash of panic washed over him, something unfamiliar and foreign underneath his skin. Not fear of death, per se, but fear of the process. Dying of an overdose is one thing. Drowning on vomit during a bout of sleep paralysis sounds less than pleasant. 

His eyes slipped closed, heavy, and then it was late afternoon, the sun having disappeared somewhere behind the trees. Kavinsky still couldn’t move. Still couldn’t breathe. 

The roiling of his stomach was getting worse. 

He heard birds: simple things, flitting from tree to tree, little black smudges in the sharp, blue sky. They were blurry. Kavinsky couldn’t see properly anymore, and it was only after a brief moment of clairvoyance that he realized his eyes would be the first to choke to death, clogged with unshed, waterlogged tears. 

Another blink. Another shift in time. Now it was nighttime. Pitch black. The birds were replaced with bats and owls and stray insects that buzzed around his face and leeched off his poison blood. 

He felt warm. He felt cold. Time had no meaning, nor did feeling. One second it was summer, then it was winter. Fall. Spring. A fifth season: something new and indescribable, painted in colors Kavinsky couldn’t understand, a spectrum so beautiful it could only be death. Sweet, sweet death.

* * *

Gansey didn’t bother shutting the Pig off when they slid to a stop outside the overgrown cemetery, gravel kicking against the chain-link fence with a sound like faraway bells. They bolted, the three of them, unfolding from the Camaro like firemen, storming into the forest. Henry wasn’t sure why, but he was ahead, eyes tunneling forward into the shaded heat of Henrietta’s most sacrilegious burial ground, desperate and terrified and confused, somewhere, faraway, for his own behavior. 

They weren’t alone, once the trees parted and the wind whispered and Henry realized he couldn’t hear Gansey shouting from behind him, couldn’t hear his own heartbeat cannon-firing against his ears. There was someone there: a person laying flat against a synthetic stone slate in the middle of the clearing, eyes wide open, breathing stopped. 

* * *

Kavinsky was dead, dying, never alive. Gone. Not gone. Again. Finally--

And then his eyes were opening, and the world of unnamable colors disappeared into the darkness of Kavinsky’s eyelids, and he was leaning over, coughing up leaves.

There was a hand on his shoulder, pressing him to his side, fingers scrambling down his throat, trying to get him to vomit up the storm of narcotics brewing inside his gut as though they hadn’t already sunken into his flesh like some sort of self-inflicted virus, an infection of the mind. 

But all that was coming up was leaves. Leaves and leaves and leaves. A forest of insanity, escaping past his lips. 

Kavinsky laughed. It sounded like the hiss of trees in the wind. 

And then he passed out again. This time, there was no colorful world. There was no fifth season. There was just darkness, and pain, and pain, and  _ pain _ .

* * *

“Oh,” Gansey said quietly. “Oh my.”

Henry was panting, hands scrambling through basic first aid, pressing against Kavinsky’s pulse, finding it erratic, licking the back of his hand and holding it over Kavinsky’s (now, thankfully, empty) mouth, finding Kavinsky’s breath choppy and weak, cold against the moisture on his skin.

“Cheng,” Ronan said. He gripped Henry’s shoulder. “Cheng. Hey, what the fuck, man. Henry! Hey!”

Henry fell back, eyes wide, and stared up at them. They looked back: Gansey concerned, Ronan angry. But Ronan was always angry. Somehow, that was more comforting to see than Gansey’s penchant for mother-henning.

“I’m fine,” he said, taking a few solid, stabilizing breaths. The heat of the midday prickled at his skin. 

“Henry,” Gansey said.

“Really.” He tried a smile. “Can, uh, one of you help me pick him up?”

“What, are we seriously going to just toss him in the back seat of the Pig and call it a day?” Ronan bared his teeth like a hyena. “What in the  _ actual _ fuck is going on?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Gansey said, infuriatingly calm.

“He just--” Ronan let out a sharp breath, paced up a row of gravestones, paced back. “He just fucking puked up a  _ bush _ .”

“Well, at least we know it’s our particular brand of magic,” Henry said quietly, leaning forward over his knees. Kavinsky was still unconscious: breathing weakly, but alive.

“Should we, uh.” Gansey scratched at the skin of his cheeks behind his glasses. “Should we take him to a hospital?”

“ _ No _ .” Ronan stepped between them. “No. Not a chance in hell, Gansey. The moment they see what he can do, they’ll tear him open like he’s a stuffed animal and put him in a bunch of glass jars.” He leaned in Gansey’s face. “And  _ then  _ who do you think they’ll come for?”

“We can take him to Monmouth,” Gansey said, looking Ronan square in the eye, not budging. Ronan had a few inches on Gansey, but Henry wouldn’t have been able to tell.

“And what, let him crash on our couch? Joseph god-damn Kavinsky, stealing your Frosted Mini-Wheats and playing sleepover? Is that what you really think will happen?”

“Ronan, he’s dying.”

“No,” Henry said, strangely certain. “No, he’s not.”

Gansey pointed at the grave’s headstone, where Kavinsky’s own name was carved. There was a half-empty bag of pills tossed against the side. A bottle of gin drained into the soil.

“He’s not,” Henry repeated. He swallowed, looking at the ground. The leaves there looked foreign, nothing like the ones on the trees that surrounded them. They were waxy and sharp at the edges, a brilliant shade of green that changed hues if you moved. And then there was Kavinsky, a boy with sharp edges and colorful attitude. “I think,” he said, “that there’s something in him, now. Something different.”

“Cabeswater?” Ronan asked.

“No, I don’t think so,” Gansey said, crouching low in front of Kavinsky’s face. He picked up a leaf, held it up to his eye. “Do we even really know why you dreamed Cabeswater to be a forest in the first place, Ronan?”

“Uh,” Ronan said, “because I like forests?”

“Well, sure,” Gansey said, frowning, “but that’s a natural thing. The ley lines are natural, too. It would have been bizarre if Cabeswater had come out looking like a city, or the moon, or something like that. Something unnatural.” He twisted the leaf. The colors shifted. Henry thought he saw purple and red - maybe it was blood? “This could be the ley line. Directly. No middle man this time.”

“Are we sure that’s how this works?” Ronan asked.

Gansey smiled, eager and bright. He pocketed the leaf. “No.”

Kavinsky grunted on the floor, convulsing a bit at Henry’s feet. His eyes were flashing back and forth, back and forth underneath his eyelids. 

“Okay,” Gansey said, sighing, “we need to get him somewhere else.”

“Where?” Ronan grunted, unamused.

“Somewhere,” Gansey said. “It doesn’t matter right now. We’ll figure that part out when he wakes up.”

“We can take him to Litchfield,” Henry said. “I already told him he could take one of the spare rooms there if he promised not to tear the place up.”

“Big fucking promise,” Ronan said.

“Would you rather he bunk with you?” Henry said, raising an eyebrow.

“Fuck you, Cheng.”

“Only if Adam’s into it, too,” Henry said without skipping a beat, clawing to his feet. “Now help me pick him up. He may be a twig, but he’s a  _ heavy _ twig.”

Ronan looked like he’d rather self-immolate.

“I’ve got it,” Gansey said, positioning himself at Kavinsky’s feet. He scooped up Kavinsky’s legs like it was nothing; Henry was starting to think he wasn’t needed at all. “Just be sure not to drop him.”

“I doubt that’d make things worse,” Ronan muttered, but he followed close behind them as they walked back to the Camaro, watching the horizon with a razor-thin scowl.

They drove to Henry’s house in relative silence. Ronan stole back the front seat, leaving Henry in the back with a haphazardly-propped-up Kavinsky in the seat next to him. In his sleep, the frown lines on his face didn’t make him look manic. They just made him look tired.

They pulled into the drive just as the sun was starting to dip behind the treeline, leaving the wilds of suburban Henrietta cast in bizarre shadow. Ronan didn’t bother moving, so it was Gansey that had to step out of the Pig and pull his seat back for Henry to shove Kavinsky (and himself) out. It was Gansey, also, that offered a shoulder for Henry to prop Kavinsky between, walking him through the door and up the stairs and into the empty bedroom across the hall from Henry’s. Ronan just watched them from behind the Pig’s windshield.

“Don’t mind him,” Gansey said, once they’d let Kavinsky settle on the empty bed and closed the door. He tried a smile, but it just came out as a grimace. “He has…  _ experience  _ with Joseph. It’s nothing personal. Not with you, at least.”

Henry nodded. Sometimes, he was reminded - rather painfully - that he was still the member of their little group that was the most wet behind his ears. “What happened, if you don’t mind my prying?”

“That,” Gansey said, now grimacing in earnest, “is something better left to Ronan to explain.” He looked at his feet. “Or Kavinsky, for that matter.”

“Well then,” Henry said. “Now I’m all excited.” He walked Gansey to the door, held it open long enough to shoot a wave at Ronan that went ignored. “I’ll come by later to pick up my car,” he said, shouting over the Pig’s rumbling idle. 

“Take your time,” Gansey shouted back, smirking. “At least this time you don’t have a car he can steal!”

He folded himself into the driver’s seat, slamming the door with a percussive clap, and Henry was turning around to let himself back inside when he heard Ronan’s voice call out through the Pig’s open window.

“If he dreams,” Ronan said, “call me.” 

And then they were gone, and Henry was alone with Kavinsky, and one of the longest days in Henry’s life was finally -  _ finally _ \- coming to a close.

He looked down at himself and wrinkled his nose. He was never,  _ ever _ wearing Hello Kitty sweatpants again.

* * *

Kavinsky woke to more blue. It was an off-color thing, spackled and dark at the edges, and it curled around him in sharp angles instead of the endless embrace of Henrietta’s massive sky.

Inside. He was inside.

He tried to move; at first, he couldn’t do anything but sit and stare, trace patterns in the paint above him. Then he could twiddle his toes, and his fingers, and finally, blissfully, he could roll over, let his body breathe again.

Although - he didn’t feel sick anymore. He felt fine. Perfectly fine, in fact. Sober, unfortunately, but that was a problem for a future Kavinsky to sort out. For now, however, he had to piss, and it was that altogether  _ human _ need, not curiosity, that dragged him out of the strange blue room he found himself in and into the hallway. 

Henry Cheng’s hallway. In Henry Cheng’s house.

“Fuck,” he said, and his voice was unpleasant-sounding enough to double his efforts for no extra charge.

He stumbled down the hall, still wearing Cheng’s ratty car clothes, still smelling like gin, still feeling like shit, and found the bathroom door - something he’d remembered, vaguely, from the strange, halcyon time  _ before _ he’d tried to kill himself. Well, the second time, at least. He was still a tad incensed that the first time didn’t work out in the end, either, but again: future Kavinsky, another time.

He heard it before he even tried the handle: the hiss of the shower, the low hum of Cheng’s voice, singing to some sort of bad eighties song. Occupied.

“Shit,” he bit out, closing his eyes, letting his forehead tap against the thin wood of the bathroom door. 

The singing stopped.

“Joseph?” Cheng asked. “Kavinsky?”

Kavinsky ignored him, ignored the sound of the shower shutting off, ignored the sound of a towel frantically flopping all over the place, ignored the firm patter of bare feet on tile. He walked downstairs instead, toward the front door, content to piss in the bushes outside. But then the bathroom door flung open, dumping a cloud of steam into the hallway, and Cheng was there, eyes wide, concerned, and half naked.

“Uh,” Kavinsky said, and found himself more embarrassed at his own accidental embarrassment than he was embarrassed for… you know. The thing he should have been embarrassed for.

Cheng looked different with his hair down, with a towel wrapped around his waist, with the soft warmth of hot water clinging to his skin in broad, red splotches. He didn’t look like a stuck-up ass, for one thing. For another, he looked… normal. Like a boy. A normal boy. 

Kavinsky was so unfamiliar with normal it almost hurt, a bit.

“Do you need to use it?” Cheng asked, jutting a finger over his shoulder. “The bathroom, I mean. The Oval Office. The porcelain throne. The… uh… Elton John?”

Kavinsky’s face twisted up. “What the fuck are you talking about?” he asked.

“What about a shower, actually?” Cheng asked, and his face lit up instantly, pleased at the success of his own idea. Christ, he was such a politician. Kavinsky redacted his prior normal-related comments. “You haven’t had one in, like, eleven months, right? Shit, take all the time you want. I just warmed the pipes up for you. You’ve probably got, like, a solid hour of time to just sit and contemplate stuff.” He swallowed. Kavinsky followed his Adam’s apple down his throat, didn’t realize he had done it until he was already looking back up again.

“Like Elton John?” Kavinsky asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Well, I mean.” Cheng scratched his chest. “He’s kind of an international treasure?”

“And you want to shit on him?”

“It was a poor turn of phrase, I’ll admit.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Kavinsky murmured, and ducked his head, shoving past. He slammed the door of the bathroom behind him, not bothering to lock it. 

“Hey,” Cheng called from the hallway, “I’ll, uh. Leave some clothes out here for you? I think I found some stuff that might fit. I hope you’re okay with Katy Perry.”

Kavinsky stood frozen until he heard Cheng moving away, allowing himself to stew in the humidity of Cheng’s shower until he couldn’t take the lack of motion anymore and jerked forward in a mindless rush. 

He didn’t think when he twisted the knob in the stall, didn’t think when he stepped under the scalding hot water, didn’t think when he looked down at himself, still fully-clothed, and watched the water stain through the fabric. Like blood, he thought. Water always looked like blood at night. 

He didn’t think when he stepped out of the stall two hours later, water freezing cold, and found a pleasant stack of clothes and a fresh towel sitting on the closed toilet seat.

When he looked down at himself, saw the water-soaked hoodie clinging to his skin, at the gift from before he was still unsure of, he stripped down and climbed back in the shower, thinking again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HI
> 
> Sorry for disappearing like that! I ended up taking a few weeks off from this project to work on my novel (which is finished now!) and then I got a very time-consuming full time job, so my writing time went down drastically.
> 
> Also uhh I may or may not have started writing a sex scene for this fic, lmao - is that something y'all would be okay with? 👀
> 
> Thank you for reading, and for being patient!!
> 
> **[Twitter](https://twitter.com/EndoWrites) **


	6. More Human Than Human

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> > But Kavinsky looked trounced. Looked undone. Henry didn’t remember much from the day of Gansey’s reckoning (or coronation, depending on whose scholarly texts you consulted on the matter), but he did remember this: gaunt faces, skin thin and nearly translucent, eyes thousands of miles away. Kavinsky looked like a bag of bones, the loose assembly of a boy. This had been his own reckoning.
>> 
>> Or, Henry thought, sitting up straighter, this was the beginning of one.

**** Henry would have been lying if he’d said he wasn’t an anxious mess waiting for Kavinsky to step out of the shower.

He felt like he was trying to win over a feral cat. The clothes were an offering, and if they weren’t accepted, Henry was worried Kavinsky would bolt again, would try and make for the hills and do something even more drastic and even more flamboyant.

Because they knew, now. They knew what his intentions were. And Henry was terrified of being the only thing keeping Kavinsky from himself.

He heard the faucet stop, heard Kavinsky moving around in the bathroom down the hall, and then, strangely, heard the faucet turn on again. The water had been running for far too long, now - far longer than the shitty hot water heater Miss Woo still hadn’t bothered replacing was capable of. But then, just as soon after, it was off again, and Kavinsky was padding across the bathroom, back and forth, back and forth, doing whatever it was he felt the need to do after a shower. Henry was certainly not one to talk about post-shower, pre-bedtime routine.

It was dark outside. The time in the cemetery and then the time it took for Henry to sit in a small ball at the foot of his bed decompressing and then the time it took to do a quick workout to get his mind running at full tilt again added up, and now it was nearing midnight, and Henry realized, slowly, fearfully, that he was starving. And if he was starving, then Kavinsky had to be, too. 

The image of Kavinsky coughing up leaves stuck in his mind, and he worried, somewhere, if his stomach could even  _ handle _ something like dinner at the moment.

Henry heard the door open, smelled the scent of his own coconut shampoo drifting through the hallway. And then Kavinsky was there, wearing Henry’s clothes (again), looking red in the face and exhausted and absolutely, completely out of his element.

It wasn’t that Kavinsky was incapable of adaptation. He was a Raven Boy through and through, and with the uniform and the air of pomp and circumstance came the implicit skill of blending in wherever necessary. There was a reason why Aglionby spat out so many politicians and businessmen. 

But Kavinsky looked trounced. Looked  _ undone _ . Henry didn’t remember much from the day of Gansey’s reckoning (or coronation, depending on whose scholarly texts you consulted on the matter), but he  _ did _ remember this: gaunt faces, skin thin and nearly translucent, eyes thousands of miles away. Kavinsky looked like a bag of bones, the loose assembly of a boy. This had been his own reckoning.

Or, Henry thought, sitting up straighter, this was the beginning of one.

“Well,” he said, leaning up on his bed and pausing the movie he was only kind of, sort of watching. “You feel adequately cooked?”

Kavinsky raised an eyebrow.

Henry huffed. “I’m asking if you feel any better.”

Kavinsky shrugged. He stood in the doorway, confused, eyes looking into Henry’s room and then over his shoulder at the empty room across the hall that used to be Lee Squared’s. 

Oh. He was bashful. That was… almost hilarious, if Henry wasn’t already acutely aware of the sort of person Kavinsky could be.

“You can come in here if you want,” Henry said, scooting over on the bed, patting it a few times for good measure. “I’m just watching Blade Runner.”

Kavinsky raised an eyebrow. “Do you have a  _ thing  _ for eighties movies?”

“How else am I going to keep my reservoir of shitty pop culture references topped up?” Henry asked, smiling. “Besides, I’m less watching it and more letting it watch me.” 

He didn’t exactly want to say  _ why _ he was finding it hard to pay attention, but judging by the look Kavinsky gave him as he entered the room in several silent, careful strides, it was obvious he understood what Henry was saying regardless.

“Are you hungry?” he said instead, giving Kavinsky the gift of not having to find a way to continue the conversation on his own. “I was thinking of just ordering a pizza, but, like, I don’t exactly know what kind of pizza you like, or if you even  _ like _ pizza, so.”

Kavinsky laughed. It was a quiet, breathy, squeaky thing. “Yeah,” he said, collapsing on the bed next to him. “I fucking like pizza. What kind of freak do you take me for?”

Henry shrugged. “I know a lot of freaks. You wouldn’t be remiss among them.”

“Guess it takes one to know one,” Kavinsky said. He expanded on the bed like a puddle, stretching out further the more comfortable he seemed. Henry was relatively pleased at that.

He plugged an order silently into his phone, opting for one pizza with pepperoni and one with cheese, in the potentially hilarious and unlikely event that Kavinsky was vegetarian. 

“So,” Henry asked, sitting back, tossing his phone onto the bed beside him. “What do you want to do? I can change the movie if you want, but just know that there’s a non-zero chance I’ll sing along to musicals, and I’ll quote the shit out of anything else until you’re sick of me and try to throw me out of a window, so it’s six one way, half dozen the other.”

“I have done that before,” Kavinsky said.

“Sing along to a musical?”

“Throw someone out of a window.”

“Ah.” Henry snorted. Again, he was glad he was largely immune to Kavinsky’s sharp attitude from being around Ronan for so long.

They sat in silence, letting the quiet hum of the movie fill the space between them. Henry could feel Kavinsky’s eyes on him, could smell the soap on his skin and the mint on his breath. He wondered if Kavinsky had done all of this for himself, or if he was doing it for Henry: following the rules, behaving well, acting like a normal guest. 

Because Henry knew better. He knew the kind of person Kavinsky was, knew what he could do. Knew what he was capable of. Kavinsky was an unhinged, dangerous, scary person on the best of days, and when he wasn’t, it probably meant you had something he wanted, and that was somehow even worse.

“Hey,” Kavinsky asked, before Henry could let himself spiral into doubt any further. “What happened? Back there. Because I know for sure I didn’t pass out in your house.”

“Ah,” Henry said again, somehow expecting the question and yet, somehow, not. “Well, there’s a lot of the story that you’ll probably have to fill in yourself, because I only know what happened at the end.”

Kavinsky looked at him. Henry sighed.

“You died,” he said simply. “Or came very close to it, at least. From what I could see.” He readjusted himself on the bed. “But in the end, you didn’t.”

Kavinsky’s jaw flexed, but he said nothing.

“Something… happened.” Henry scrubbed a hand through his messy, unkempt hair. Kavinsky kept  _ looking _ at him. “But something’s  _ always _ happening in this godforsaken town, so that doesn’t really mean much.”

“I died,” Kavinsky repeated, but it sounded more like a correction than a statement. Kavinsky was certain of it.

“You did,” Henry said, “but then you didn’t. Like I said, a common theme around here.”

Kavinsky fidgeted. He said nothing. The movie kept playing, throwing awkward, multicolored shadows over both of their faces and the rest of the room.

“Did you want to?” Henry asked.

Kavinsky looked at him.

“Did I want to?” he asked, laughing sharp and fierce, all edges, all at once, flared out like a porcupine or an iron maiden or something else, something worse. “Yeah. Yeah, I fucking did.”

“Because you don’t want to be alive anymore?”

“Because I’m already dead,” Kavinsky said. “Because it’s just going back there. This isn’t right. None of this is fucking right.”

“Unless it is,” Henry said. “Unless you’re supposed to come back. For some reason.”

Kavinsky fell back against the bed. “I don’t fucking know, man.” He said it quietly - a brief exhale.

Henry looked up at the ceiling, where shadows ate the corners of the room, softening them. Maybe that’s what was happening, now. Kavinsky was softening. Maybe he didn’t want to soften.

Harrison Ford moved across the screen, flitting from room to room, a gun in his hand, danger in a dangerous world. This was how Henry felt: like a lone ranger, searching Kavinsky’s mind for answers, avoiding booby traps and landmines and foul looks. Any minute now, he expected Kavinsky to reach up and pull him under again, laughing in his face, all a prank. Because that’s who Kavinsky was.

But this Kavinsky was different. The Kavinsky from the diner was different. The Kavinsky from the assisted living home was different. There were dozens of flavors of Kavinsky, all toxic, colored like the bags of pills found in his hoodie’s pocket. Maybe there was something inside of him that wanted it all  _ gone _ .

“You coughed up leaves,” Henry said.

Kavinsky said nothing.

“When you were dead,” Henry clarified. “They came up your throat. It was… very strange. Like something out of--”

He almost said ‘Ronan’s forest’, but stopped himself just in time - both because he knew Ronan’s name would set Kavinsky off, and also because he wasn’t entirely sure it was just Ronan’s forest anymore. 

But Kavinsky spoke for him, saying something that was, in essence, even more correct. His voice was raspy and thin. “Something out of a dream.” 

Ronan’s face, sharp and sterile and full of sin, flashed through Henry’s mind.  _ If he dreams, call me _ .

That didn’t fucking matter much when the entire world felt like a dream.

A gunshot rattled off in the movie, dull and muted through the quiet speakers of Henry’s television. Despite that, he flinched. 

Downstairs, the doorbell rang. Kavinsky didn’t move. Instead, he watched Henry clamor to his feet and slide on a light jacket and tousle with his hair in the reflection of the bedroom’s open window.

“Please,” he said emotionlessly, “don’t get up.”

Kavinsky smirked at him in that way that was neither humorous nor malicious, and Henry felt it on his back the entire way down the hall.

Nothing quite made sense those days - but, then again, nothing quite ever made sense. Not at first. He supposed that was part of the game of living life atop a magical superconductor: things were always moving faster than you could keep up. For some, that was magic in and of itself. Gansey’s smiling face could have charmed even the most thorny of situations. For others, like Adam - and, to a lesser extent, Ronan - the leyline was more a curse than a blessing. Henry was rapidly losing sight of precisely where he sat on that spectrum, and suspected the same thing was happening to Kavinsky but in reverse.

The pizza was already lukewarm by the time he’d taken the boxes out of the delivery boy’s arms, but Henry didn’t mind much. He slung the two-liter bottle of Pepsi under his arm and juggled their late dinner all the way back up to his bedroom, tossing a crumpled twenty into the delivery boy’s open jacket like he was making a three-pointer (he missed).

He tossed the pizza onto the bed in a lazy arc, and Kavinsky waited until it settled before he pounced, trying his best to look  blasé  about it despite being obviously starved. (He started with the cheese pizza, much to Henry’s amusement.)

“What?” he asked, prickling at the edges, when Henry rolled his eyes and snorted around a bite of pepperoni. “Give me that soda. Ugh, is that Pepsi? Are you suicidal?” Despite the wrinkling of his nose, Kavinsky waggled his free hand in the air expectantly.

“Funny,” Henry said, “but no. I forgot to grab cups downstairs. I’m not letting you drink out of the bottle raw.”

“Oh, c’mon, sweetheart,” Kavinsky said. “I’ll use protection.”

Henry stared into the middle distance. “I’ll go get us some cups.” 

It took him barely longer to find a glass than it had to get the pizza in the first place, but when he returned, Kavinsky had a faraway look in his eye, all humor drained from his ruddy, showerstained cheeks. He was watching the movie.

This was just as much the leyline as it was Kavinsky: here one moment, gone the next. Perhaps there was more than leaves hidden in the lining of his gut. Henry was sure about a lot of things in life, and he was surest in this: he still had a lot to learn about this new Joseph Kavinsky.

On the screen, the final scenes of Blade Runner ran their course. Henry let a swallow slide down his throat.

“All those moments,” he repeated, mouthing along with the actor’s words, “will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.”

“Time to die,” Kavinsky finished, but this time, Henry wasn’t so sure he meant it.

* * *

Ronan watched Henrietta ooze by, caught in the framing of the Pig’s windshield.

They were driving in circles, rocketing down the main highway and sliding down offramps and looping through side streets and blasting back up onramps, over and over again, the Pig wheezing and churning and moaning through every lunge of Gansey’s shoes on the accelerator. 

He knew what Gansey was doing, and he hated that it was working. What was he, a sleepless infant?

“You know,” Gansey said, changing gear effortlessly, “you’re both really bad at agreeing with each other.”

The part of Ronan that sounded suspiciously like Declan decided yes, yes he was. To both the agreeing part and the infant part.

That was an understatement. Adam and Ronan fought over the logistics of fighting more than they ever fought over the fights themselves: it was always the  _ feeling _ of the fight that stuck around the longest, digging its claws into the shadows on Ronan’s shoulders and spurring him along until he found a crack in Adam to pry at. And Adam wasn’t quite the same: he packed his fight into thin, neat layers, pressurized by time, until something came along and sprung the top off the trap (usually Ronan) and it all came spilling out like water from a cracked dam.

Fuck, Ronan thought. Even the way they got angry was similar.

“You know,” Gansey said, filling the silence, “whenever I get angry with Jane--”

“Nope,” Ronan said, cutting him off. “Nope, I’m not going to hear it. Save it for your late night Skype calls to Timbuktu or wherever the fuck it is she’s off to right now. If this is going to turn into marriage counseling then I’ll press the ejector seat button and blast through your roof.”

“You can try,” Gansey said easily, rapping his knuckles against the steel roof. “You’d have better luck clawing out of a tank, in my opinion.” He look at him out of the corner of his eye. “And it’s Nicaragua, not Timbuktu.”

“May as well be the same fucking thing,” Ronan grumbled, but his words held no heat. “I still don’t know why you didn’t go with her.”

“Next time,” Gansey said easily. “Regardless, you’re just upset because Jane and I are capable of communicating using human words, instead of caveman grunts. And, for the record, that’s just as much as an indictment of Adam as it is of you. Because again - you’re both clueless.”

Were they, though? Because Ronan didn’t feel even the slightest bit bad about blaming as much as he could on Kavinsky and sleeping off the rest. That was less cluelessness and more purposeful disdain.

“You could try talking to him,” Gansey continued, shrugging a shoulder. He changed gears.

For a flare of panic, Ronan thought he had meant Kavinsky and not Adam. “I don’t think that’s a good idea right now,” he said evenly. “He doesn’t want to see me.” As it happened, that answer would have worked for either.

“Maybe not at the time. But you know Adam better than anyone else. What do you honestly think he’s doing right now?”

Working. Working or sleeping or fretting over something banal and mundane. Usually that something was Ronan, but it was the good kind of fretting - worrying that he remembered to change his oil on time or that his collar wasn’t crooked or that he bothered showing up to class on the days where it actually mattered (a calendar that Ronan fiercely disagreed with, but nonetheless). 

“Oh,” Ronan said, but he’d known all along. It just took longer for the part of his brain steering the ship to open its eyes and listen to the screaming from the rest of the crew. Iceberg, right ahead. “Shit.”

“Oh,” Gansey agreed, and Pig took another exit off the interstate, this one toward St. Agnes, “shit.”

* * *

Adam would have paced a trench into the worn, weathered floor of his apartment if he knew it wouldn’t have cost him his security deposit. 

Instead, he looked out the window, watching bugs dance around the hazy street lamps in loose, airy orbits. 

Rage bloomed inside of Adam the way a rose did: beautifully and sudden. It died the same way a rose did, too: less beautiful, even more sudden. Now he felt like a wilted mess, alone, trying to carve through his stack of summer reading in the brief respite of free time he had between jobs that left him miserably overthinking things.

He shouldn’t have gotten out of the car. He shouldn’t have stormed off like that. But at the same time, he knew he had to - the time alone on the walk back to his apartment had been exactly what he needed to straighten his thoughts and realign his concerns and draft them into something comprehensible and objective instead of messy and difficult to explain. The problems came, as they always did, when he got back home, and the time alone stretched from pleasant to torturous. 

Ronan was struggling. It was obvious. Adam had never particularly liked Kavinsky even on the best of days, but he had no idea what the other Raven Boy was capable of. Watching Matthew crawl out of the back of a Mitsubishi Evo set his blood on fire for reasons he hadn’t quite understood at the time, but now that he had Ronan and everything that entailed, he couldn’t have found it inside of himself to care that Kavinsky had died that day.

And now here he was, alive again, ready to push all of Ronan’s buttons and bring chaos back to their lives just when things had finally leveled out again. 

The evening fog was settling in, crawling up the banks of the faraway creekbed and casting Henrietta in a dull sort of spooky allure. Sometimes, when Adam was feeling particularly sorry for himself, Henrietta would remind him of who he was, where he came from, a soft hand of nature and quiet that felt so foreign - but necessary - on his skin, like a bag of frozen peas on a bruised face. Sometimes, he’d remember why leaving here would be so hard.

Out of the fog came a figure.

Adam jumped. It wasn’t exactly foreign for people to wander around the church grounds - visiting loved ones in the cemetery, speaking with the nuns or the priest, just coming to glare at it - but they always came by car, and Adam could always pair up the sounds of cars entering and cars leaving in the back of his mind so he knew he didn’t have to worry.

People didn’t come by foot. Not normally.

But, Adam supposed, Ronan wasn’t exactly normal.

He watched him lurk down the side of the road, stalk through the parking lot, disappear down the side of the church and up the stairs to Adam’s apartment and then… nothing. Silence.

Adam frowned. Anticipation was a four-letter word, in his humble opinion. Ronan was there. He was  _ there _ . Why didn’t he knock?

Carefully, with a surprisingly amount of hesitation, Adam peeled open the door.

Ronan was standing three feet away, eyes unfocused, head leaned against the side of the building.

“I don’t recall ordering pizza,” Adam said drily. “Or a lady of the night.”

Ronan looked at him but said nothing. If he was anyone else, that might have been a smile.

Adam pulled the door open all the way and gestured loosely over his shoulder with his head. “You coming in?”

A pause. “Only if you want me to,” Ronan said in a quiet voice.

“Oh, please, like that’s ever stopped you before.” Adam turned and watched him. “Seriously? We fight all the time. Now comes the fun part. Get in here and keep me company; I’d rather stab my eyes out than read another page of The Scarlet Letter without having someone to rant about it to.”

Ronan stepped inside.

Adam fussed with his homework, stacking papers and rearranging books and moving things around - as much as he could with as little he had to work with. Behind him, Ronan walked slowly around the room, reassessing things, almost as though he were taking in the room with new eyes.

“Why did you walk here?” Adam asked.

Ronan, finally, looked at him. “Gansey kicked me out of the Pig off the freeway,” he said. “Took a page out of your book.” Then, without skipping a beat: “Does Kavinsky know you live here?”

Adam blinked. “What?”

“Was he dead by the time you moved?” Ronan scratched loosely at the skin of his forehead. “I don’t… shit.” He sighed. “I’m just--”

Adam abandoned his notes. He took a step back from his desk and pulled Ronan’s hand away from his head. “Hey.”

From the pained expression on Ronan’s face, Adam knew he wouldn’t be getting much more work done that day. The fact he didn’t mind, however, was something he actively chose to ignore.

Ronan leaned to the side, pressing his forehead silently into Adam’s shoulder. They stood there for a long moment, a collection of heartbeats, a pair of boys in the middle of a dusty, sparse apartment. 

“Sorry,” he mumbled. 

Adam looked down at him. His hand came up on its own and cupped the back of Ronan’s head, feeling at the soft skin around his ear. 

Ronan didn’t get scared, he got anxious. He got worked up until his mind was spinning its tires in loose mud. He was always searching for solutions. He was always working towards an end. They were alike in that regard: Adam did the same thing. Ronan, however, had a shorter fuse, and throwing a match on something and watching it burn to the ground was far more Ronan’s style when the going got particularly rough.

Kavinsky, though, was different. Kavinsky was an outlier, an independent variable, something that Ronan couldn’t track and parse or predict. This new Kavinsky was so new that even Kavinsky was confused, and it had sent Ronan into a tailspin - Adam knew this because he couldn’t make sense of it himself. The mud had turned to quicksand. Fear had turned to rage. 

“What for?” Adam said dismissively, because for as hard as it was for Ronan to apologize, it was nearly harder for Adam to hear. That was as close as Adam could get to “I understand”.

“Never mind,” Ronan grumbled, pressing himself further into Adam’s side, which was as close as Ronan could get to “thank you”. 

They folded down onto Adam’s bed, a messy tangle of miscommunication. Ronan, as impossible as ever, wedged himself under Adam’s arm and under Adam’s neck and against the side of Adam’s shoulder. He stopped moving, and Adam wrapped an arm around the solid mass of his back.

They didn’t move for a long while. Adam stroked the side of Ronan’s head, watching Ronan close his eyes.

“The leaves,” Ronan said. “Those leaves.”

“Yeah,” Adam said. “That’s all I’ve been able to think about, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeehaw they're all so gay
> 
> This is the last chapter I'll probably be able to upload until sometime in December; I'm doing NaNo this year and that starts bright and early on the first of the month! I already have a decent chunk of the next few chapters plotted out, I just gotta write them now. Hang tight!! Follow me on twitter in the meantime if you want to watch me lose my everloving shit as I read CDTH, because that's absolutely, definitely going to happen.
> 
> Thank you for reading!!!
> 
> **[Twitter](https://twitter.com/EndoWrites) **


	7. When a Tree Falls...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> > Kavinsky’s rage stiffened into a tangible form. He wielded it like a weapon. “You are a weak, pathetic, spineless child of a man, Ronan Lynch,” he spat. “The fact you’re still here a year later, attached by a leash to your gaggle of keepers, is because you’re too chickenshit to _live_.”
>> 
>> “And you are an autofellating attention whore that couldn’t see further than six inches into the future.” The door slammed shut, and Adam Parrish walked in.

It was raining in Kavinsky’s dream.

Normally, the rainy dreams were the worst. When Kavinsky woke from these dreams, he’d bring with him a massive puddle and soak through his sheets - or, worse still, he’d bring one of the stormclouds into reality and would have to chase it around his house until it escaped out a window. It was an altogether unglamorous experience, and everything Kavinsky did was an attempt to avoid unglamorous experiences.

But  _ this  _ rain, coming from nowhere and everywhere, seeping through his skin, cooling parts of him that rarely cooled, was… nice. Very nice. 

Kavinsky got up - he was laying down, apparently - and stretched, his spine cracking, his bones realigning underneath his skin. 

The world of his dream was empty - as empty as anything could get inside of one’s mind. There was always something there, just on the edges, a flicker of thought, a flash of  _ something _ familiar. It was like trying to meditate, back when his deadbeat mother had been on a meditation and personal enlightenment kick in his preteen years. You could never  _ completely _ wipe your mind of thought. Not  _ completely. _

Kavinsky paced through his own mind, letting the infinite rain run over him. The horizon line was a blurry, foggy grey. Nothing happened when he walked toward it, nothing happened when he walked away from it - it stayed where it was, like Kavinsky was an afterthought, something small and infinitesimal. Irrelevant.

The comfort of the rain suddenly became claustrophobic. Painful, even. It burrowed into his skin, running through him like he wasn’t there at all, and the sky around him, bleak and grey and  _ forever _ , wrapped over his shoulders like a weightless blanket.

He slammed his eyes shut. No. No, no, no. This was nothing. This was  _ nothing _ . He was nothing. There was only dust, and dust, and dust--

Kavinsky curled into himself. He gripped himself around his legs and tried to control his breathing. 

The grey was still there. So was the rain. He closed his eyes, opened them, closed them again, but nothing changed. It was  _ still there _ .

He took in a shuddered gasp, but it felt like nothing entered his lungs. He couldn’t even feel his chest inflate. Couldn’t hear the sound of his breathing. 

The claustrophobia increased. It was inside his skin now, something he couldn’t scratch away, but he couldn’t touch himself, couldn’t feel his own body through the tips of his fingers. 

This wasn’t a nightmare. Kavinsky’d had his fair share of nightmares, where the forests would birth monsters the size of jet planes and the sky would turn blood red. He’d watched himself die countless times, watched his family die, watched his friends die. Sometimes, Ronan would live, and those dreams were just as much nightmares as the rest in their own sick way.

This wasn’t a nightmare. This was worse.

The opposite of love wasn’t hate, it was indifference. The same applied to dreams - the opposite of a bright, shiny, magical dream wasn’t a nightmare, it was this: a world where Kavinsky meant  _ nothing _ . His body was nothing more than a shadow. The world he was trapped in was nothing more than a prison.

He gasped again, desperate just for the  _ feeling _ of breath, the sound it made when it shuddered up his throat. Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

He scratched at the ground with his bare fingers, clawing and clawing and clawing at nothing, at the emptiness beneath him that was just as empty as the emptiness above him. The rain wasn’t rain - it was static. He didn’t feel tears prickling at the edges of his eyes, but he saw his vision warble; he didn’t feel the choked sob work its way out of his mouth, but he knew it was there nonetheless.

He clawed and clawed, desperate. There had to be something there. There had to be.

Dirt. Dirt appeared. He was pushing around dirt. Dirt, and soil, and ash, and--

Roots? Roots that lead to a stem, a stem that lead to a trunk, a trunk that lead to a tree, and  _ leaves _ \--

* * *

Henry woke, violently, to the sound of wailing.

It wasn’t a cry. It wasn’t a shout. It was a long, low sound, something from deep inside the body, from inside the soul. 

He’d fallen asleep at some point, the half-empty pizza box draped across his lap, the Blade Runner Blu-ray menu looping in silence on the TV. Half of his face was glued to the fabric of his comforter from where he’d drooled all over himself, and his hair was crushed and matted in six different directions.

Next to him, Kavinsky twitched, half underneath the blanket, half not. His skin glistened in the television’s dull glow. He looked like he was in pain. He looked like he was dying.

Henry’s heart stopped. He remembered finding Kavinsky that first day, after he had been reborn, and remembered finding Kavinsky the second time, in the graveyard, with all those pills. 

He wasn’t sure what kind of Kavinsky he would find now.

“Hey,” Henry said, voice raw and thick with sleep, and then, “Hey,” Henry said, a little more forcefully, a little more panicked. He reached out and touched Kavinsky’s skin, gripping his shoulder.

Kavinsky’s eyes flew open. He stopped moving, stopped thrashing, stopped making noise. His eyes were open, wide and terrified, and they followed Henry as he leaned over him.

“Kavinsky? Hey. Hey, Kavinsky, come on, man. What’s going on? Are you alright? Is something wrong?”

Kavinsky was still frozen. His expression looked gaunt and hollow, something that remained after terror sucked away the rest, but at least he wasn’t moaning anymore. At least there was that.

Henry stood up, paced half a lap across his bedroom, his bare feet freezing against the wooden floor. He turned around, turned on the light, leaned back over Kavinsky again. And waited.

Seconds ticked by. Minutes. Henry and Kavinsky’s eyes remained locked on one another for the entirety of it. Then, slowly, Kavinsky’s breathing started to grow haggard, and his fingers began to twitch, and his cheeks grew wet with frustrated tears.

“Can you hear me?” Henry murmured, frowning. He wasn’t sure if he should stay away - startled dogs bit, he knew - or if he should stay close, in case Kavinsky needed care. He was just a boy, after all. The best thing for a boy to see after a nasty nightmare was always another person, someone to remind them that there was more in the world than what they might have seen in their dream.

Henry let out a wheeze of realization, going rigid the same moment Kavinsky began to move again. He was a dreamer. He was a  _ dreamer _ . Did he bring it back? Did he bring the nightmare back?

_ If he dreams, call me. _

Henry’s fingers were reaching for the nightstand where his phone sat plugged in to its charger when Kavinsky choked, his hands scrambling out from underneath the bedsheets toward his neck. He clawed at it, gasping for air, mouth flashing open, closed, open, closed like some sort of fish. 

Henry didn’t see much, but he did see leaves.

They were on his tongue, pressed against his teeth, coating every square inch of pink flesh within his mouth in sharp, waxy green. 

Henry didn’t think. He didn’t stop to consider what might happen if he shoved his fingers into Kavinsky’s mouth, that he might lose a finger to Kavinsky’s frantic ministrations, but he did it anyway. Kavinsky’s tongue was dry when the pads of his fingers brushed against it, prying out the leaves caught in his throat, one by one, until he could breathe again. They piled onto the comforter at Henry’s side, coated in blood, flashing purple-green in the dim light.

By the time they finished and Kavinsky was wheezing to catch his breath, Henry felt like he had stopped breathing himself. He sat back on his haunches, running a hand down his face, trying to ignore the leaves between them, an unspoken curse.

Kavinsky sat still, curled up around himself, hands still pressed to his throat, like he was afraid the leaves would grow back if he took them away. He was crying. They were frustrated tears, born from pain. Henry still felt like he was looking at something he didn’t deserve to see. 

“Joseph,” he began, and Kavinsky’s bloodshot eyes flashed to his immediately, like he’d forgotten Henry was there.

Kavinsky’s face contorted into a snarl. “I can’t dream,” he said. “I can’t fucking dream anymore.”

* * *

“I really don’t see why we couldn’t have just had this conversation at your place, Henry,” Gansey said, wearing a bizarre combination of pajama pants and high-end loafers. From the back seat, Kavinsky sat pressed against the window of the Camaro, his eyes partly closed. He felt drugged in all the worst ways and none of the best. His head throbbed to the beat of the Pig’s engine, and he felt like his skin was on fire, like the suddenness of being able to feel again was overstimulating. It was a thought that terrified him. How close was he to losing himself tonight? How close was he from losing himself in the worst way possible?

“It didn’t seem right,” Henry said. His voice had the same raw, synthetic evenness to it that it’d had after Kavinsky had woken up. 

From the seat beside him, Ronan glared daggers down his back. Kavinsky didn’t care. Normally, he would have reveled in the attention, hatred or not, but now, he couldn’t care less that Lynch was here. Lynch didn’t matter anymore. Nothing fucking mattered anymore.

He had been robbed. That was what happened. He’d died, and left himself in the afterlife, and then a piece of him -  _ this _ piece, whatever it was - had been taken from the rest and forced back into a body of skin and bone and dropped into Henrietta like some sort of game piece on the universe’s shittiest Monopoly board. He wasn’t  _ him _ . He couldn’t dream. What was a dreamer without his dreams?

They drove in silence. Periodically, Kavinsky felt the prickle of another pair of eyes on his neck. They felt different - different from Ronan’s for sure - but Kavinsky was still so tired. He couldn’t handle looking at Henry again. Not right now. He kept staring out the window.

They pulled up to Monmouth Manufacturing not long after, Gansey sliding the Pig in between Ronan’s beast of a BMW and Henry’s shark of a Fisker. Kavinsky followed Henry who was, in turn, following Gansey, and Ronan brought up the rear, stalking up the stairs with loud, angry footsteps. No one spoke.

The door clicked shut on Gansey’s ridiculous apartment and Kavinsky closed his eyes, waiting. The air was charged the same way it was before a fight, and while Kavinsky wasn’t certain Ronan was strong-willed enough to get physical, there  _ would _ be words. And he could fight with words just as well.

This was different than before. Before, they were just boys, caught in a web of the universe’s bizarre, grand design. Now, they were at each other’s throats again, in a way that only men could be.

Kavinsky would have been lying to himself if he said he wasn’t excited by it.

Ronan shoved him, hard. He stumbled forward, catching himself easily. “Explain,” Ronan snarled.

Kavinsky smirked and looked over his shoulder. He knew he looked like hell, and knew it was having an effect from the way Ronan was holding himself, all sharp angles and shaky, hesitant eyes. He looked like a rabbit trying to duck out of range of a predator. Gansey stood at his side, ever the watchdog, and his expression mirrored Ronan only in the sense that Gansey’s expression always mirrored Ronan when it came to Kavinsky. It was nauseating in its familiarity.

Only Henry - strange, effervescent, optimistic Henry Cheng - seemed curious, not standoffish. Worried, not mad. It was a strange expression to see directed his way. For the same reasons Ronan was scared of him, he was scared of Henry.

“I have no fucking clue, man,” Kavinsky said, focusing on Ronan. “Maybe I’m a walking, talking, bonafide Ronan Lynch nightmare.” He smiled. “Wouldn’t be the first time, I’m sure.”

Ronan’s pupils dilated. Gansey reached over and gripped his arm.

“Or maybe you’re the nightmare,” Kavinsky continued, his exhaustion bleeding from his body into his words. This was his favorite drug. This was something the ley line couldn’t take away from him - not yet, at least. “Remind me, how many bodies do you have buried behind your shitty rural hovel?”

“Kavinsky--”

Ronan fidgeted, stepping forward, then stepping back. Gansey stepped into his space, his eyes narrowing. “You need to calm down.”

Henry looked at Ronan and frowned. He crossed his arms. “Should I call Adam?” he asked.

Gansey and Ronan both said, “No,” at the same moment. 

Kavinsky sneered. “What, can’t handle a few domestic potshots without involving the missus?” He cocked his head. “Although, if I were a betting man, I’d say my guess about where you sat on the proverbial ass-fucking totem pole still held true.”

Gansey let out a sharp sigh. “Is this helping? Do you really think this is helping?”

Kavinsky threaded his hands into his borrowed sweats and leaned against the edge of Gansey’s desk. He felt various books and papers crush underneath his weight, and Gansey’s eyes flashed back and forth, back and forth from his things to Kavinsky’s face. “To be honest, yeah, it is.”

“I could kill him,” Ronan said shakily. “He’s already dead. I’d just be setting the record straight.”

“You’re not a killer,” Gansey said, not looking away. His voice was incredibly even. Kavinsky tilted his chin up, matching his stare. They were like a pair of wild dogs. “And you,” he said, frowning further in Kavinsky’s direction, “are scared.”

“The fuck I am.”

“You’re shaking,” Henry said. He took a step past the other two and looked Kavinsky square in the eye. He poked Kavinsky’s arm, and Kavinsky flinched. “Yep. You look like you just chased a shot of espresso with another, stronger shot of espresso.”

“I’m  _ not _ scared,” Kavinsky said, and the moment he did, he knew he’d lost. Pivoting, he corrected: “You’d be rattled, too, if you woke up from the world’s worst nightmare coughing up a fucking ficus.”

“Red-tipped photinia,” Gansey corrected mindlessly. When all three of them looked at him, he shrugged. “What? My dad likes botany.”

The dream was long over, but Kavinsky felt like it was just now catching up with him, like a cop following him home from a race. Only this time, he didn’t have dream things to make himself hide away. 

“I’m not fucking sure what happened, okay?” Kavinsky snapped, looking at Ronan, briefly, infinitesimally. 

“Is this a game, Kavinsky?” Gansey asked. “Is that what this is to you? You’ve done enough. Enough for one lifetime, and certainly enough for two.”

Something other than Kavinsky’s standard rage bubbled underneath the surface of his skin. It was  _ real _ anger, he realized, when he recognized the feeling from the same one he’d get around his family. “Do you honestly think,” he said, voice like cooling steel, sharp and brittle and dangerously deceptive, “that I’m doing this for fucking shits and giggles?”

Gansey said nothing. Behind him, Ronan flexed his jaw.

“Guys, I think he’s telling the truth,” Henry said. “This is… I dunno. I’ve not been around the block as many times as you have, but this looks like exactly the type of black magic fuckery that all of you thrive on.”

“Are you  _ seriously _ on his side?” Ronan asked. “This is  _ Kavinsky _ , Cheng. Joseph Kavinsky. The only good thing that ever happened to this town was the day he decided to leave it.”

Kavinsky’s rage stiffened into a tangible form. He wielded it like a weapon. “You are a weak, pathetic, spineless child of a man, Ronan Lynch,” he spat. “The fact you’re still here a year later, attached by a leash to your gaggle of keepers, is because you’re too chickenshit to  _ live _ .”

“And you are an autofellating attention whore that couldn’t see further than six inches into the future.” The door slammed shut, and Adam Parrish walked in, dangling a pair of keys in one hand and a cell phone in the other. He waggled the phone in greeting at Henry, who was holding his own phone in his own hand. “Hey.”

“Oh, joy,” Kavinsky muttered. “It’s the fun police. Still wiping your ass with recycled homework paper, Parrish?”

“In calculus, the homework is two-ply,” Adam said without breaking stride, not even looking at him. “Hey,” he said to Ronan, as though the first “Hey” weren’t enough, and this “Hey” was just for him. It was disgustingly domestic. Kavinsky’s rage shifted again, but this time it transformed into claustrophobic panic.

“So now what?” he said. “The gang’s all here. Shall we grab our Scooby Snacks and solve a murder?”

Henry snorted. Surprisingly, the claustrophobia lifted. Just a little, but a little nonetheless.

“We need to get to the bottom of this,” Gansey said. The anger was already flooding out of him, replaced with the same sort of giddy, childish excitement that Kavinsky always found ridiculous and childish. Some things never changed, it seemed. 

Still feeling bold, he jutted a thumb in Ronan’s direction. “Found him.”

Henry laughed again. Adam raised an eyebrow. Ronan’s translucent Irish skin flushed red like a bloody toilet. 

“Have you felt anything strange?” Gansey asked, ignoring them. “Do you feel… connected to anything?” He fidgeted. “I don’t know. It’s hard to explain.”

“Connected?” Kavinsky asked. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” Gansey repeated. 

Silence fell.

This was different than before. When the room was hostile, Kavinsky felt in control. Like the world wasn’t falling apart around him. Like he  _ wasn’t _ a once-dead, reborn teenager. When the room was silent, it reminded him too much of sobriety. His gut corkscrewed.

Gansey was looking at him, like he’d said enough. The infuriating thing was, he had.

“I don’t know either, okay?” he said. He scrubbed a hand through his hair. It still smelled like Henry’s coconut shampoo. “It’s not being connected. Definitely not that. Not anymore.”

“Not anymore?”

“I’m a dreamer,” Kavinsky bit out. “Or at least I  _ used _ to be. I walked the streets in my own head my entire life. I know what it’s like to be connected to something  _ other _ .”

Ronan scowled at him from behind Gansey. “They were never your streets. None of it was ever yours.”

“The streets of Henrietta were mine,” Kavinsky said. “I didn’t buy them. I didn’t find them in a dream. They were mine nonetheless.”

“The ley line -  _ Cabeswater  _ \- isn’t just a toy you can use to pad your life with trivial bullshit,” Adam said cooly. “It’s powerful. It’s alive. It deserves to be treated with respect, if for no other reason than you would deserve respect from it.”

“Adam Parrish the tree-hugger,” Kavinsky said, crossing his arms. “Who’da thunk?”

“Not just trees,” Gansey said. He was looking down at his hand. “Definitely not just trees.”

“A lot has happened,” Adam said. “Since you died, I mean. The world’s different. Things have changed. You wouldn’t recognize it.”

He hated Adam Parrish more and more with every passing breath, if for no other reason that he was frustratingly, consistently correct.

“You said you weren’t a dreamer anymore,” Ronan said suddenly. 

Kavinsky froze.

Adam raised another eyebrow. Gansey continued to frown. Henry stood off to the side, watching them spar, still in his ridiculous pajamas. 

“I…” Kavinsky’s crossed arms turned into a straightjacket. “I can’t. I can’t dream.”

“What?”

“I can’t fucking dream, okay?” He tensed. “I sleep. I wake in an empty purgatory. There’s nothing there.  _ Nothing _ . It feels like death, except I know what that feels like, and it’s beautiful, impossible silence, and this? It’s fucking hell. Worse than hell. I can’t move. I can’t breathe. There’s no air, no sky, no  _ nothing _ .” His voice crackled like static. 

“Henry,” Gansey said, “when you send a frantic text at three in the morning saying ‘Kavinsky needs us’, you might be wise to include slightly more information.”

Henry winced. “Yeah,” he said, as though that would make up for the transgression. “In my defense, I thought he was dying again, so…”

“I may as well have been,” Kavinsky said, louder. “I wish I was! Fuck. Fuck! Why the fuck am I here? What is this  _ for _ ? Torture? Punishment?”

“You deserve it,” Ronan said, but it sounded more like a pout than an insult.

“I didn’t say I didn’t,” Kavinsky snapped back. “I can’t fucking die. I can’t fucking dream. I can’t even get high for fuck’s sake. What good is  _ any _ of this?”

“Maybe so you can learn how to live without relying on any of that,” Adam said.

“Shut your fucking face, Walt Disney.”

“Maybe he’s right, though,” Gansey said. He was back to looking at his fingers, like his skin was going to suddenly start to grow moss at any moment. “Maybe this is Cabeswater. Maybe this is something deeper than that.”

“And how would you know that?” Kavinsky said with a sneer. “Magical dick-sucking?”

“The ley line,” Gansey said, lips a fine line, “has been known to take decaying bodies off the corpse road and use them for its own strange, archaic purposes.”

Ronan glanced at Henry. Henry looked at his feet. 

Kavinsky groaned. “Are you seriously fucking saying I’m not your first zombie?”

“It takes a lot to surprise us, let’s put it that way,” Gansey said.

“You don’t have any contact with Cabeswater?” Adam pressed, frowning. “With the ley line?”

Kavinsky flicked the side of his own head, painfully. “The light’s on, but nobody’s home.”

“And you can’t bring things out of your dreams?”

“There’s nothing there for me to bring out,” Kavinsky said. “It’s empty. What part of that don’t you fucking get?”

“The part where you coughed up leaves on my bed,” Henry said. “The part where this isn’t the first time you’ve done it.”

_ The part where I think you’ll do it again _ , Henry’s eyes said. Kavinsky would have denied seeing it on Cheng’s face if he hadn’t already been suspicious himself.

“Then what?” he snapped. “Don’t just fucking stand around here staring at me.”

Ronan sneered. “Why?” he asked. “Why should we care?”

“Because I have nothing else!” Kavinsky shouted. “I’m dead. If not in body, then in soul. I don’t belong here anymore. I don’t belong anywhere.” It had always been true. Now it was more literal than not.

Gansey hummed, cupping the tip of his chin between two fingers like a resplendent businessman plotting out a complicated transaction in his head. “Maybe that’s it,” he said.

“How?” Adam asked.

“Well, there’s always been a certain element of humanity to Cabeswater” --Ronan snorted-- “and it’s been known to pick up on our emotions in the past. To pick up on Ronan’s emotions.” He looked at himself again. “Maybe now I’m part of the list of its influencers.”

“So what, your untapped altruism is making Cabeswater torture Kavinsky?” Ronan asked. “Because you think he deserves to respect himself? Give me a fucking break.”

Gansey sighed sharply. “Do you have any better ideas?”

“No, but literally anything would be better than that, dude. Jesus.”

“Henrietta is changing,” Adam said quietly. “Maybe it’s too much. Maybe it’s too fast. Maybe not all the changes are sticking.”

Henry harrumphed. “I don’t care what kind of magical wonderland the ley line thinks this town is. Change happens because other change happened before it. We’re all just a string of dominoes, standing up, waiting to fall over.”

“So what are you saying?” Kavinsky asked. His voice held no fire. He was tired - even too tired for this, now. 

“I’m saying,” Henry said, pointing at him, “that you’re still a domino. You’ve just been pulled aside.” He gestured at the rest of them. “And now, you need to be brought back in line.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!! Sorry for evaporating into thin air at the end of October. I hope you enjoyed, despite the long wait!
> 
> Next chapter is. hmm. 👀 "Gay" is one word for it. "Ridiculously Gay" is two.
> 
> FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER i desperately need more TRC mutuals!! 
> 
> **  
> [Twitter](https://twitter.com/EndoWrites)  
>  **

**Author's Note:**

> **[Twitter](https://twitter.com/EndoWrites) | [Tumblr](https://endowrites.tumblr.com)**


End file.
